Taotlus

1

Guidelines for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol on Water and Health

Background and objectives

1. In accordance with article 6 of the Protocol on Water and Health, Parties are required to set targets and target dates within two years after ratification. The Meeting of the Parties evaluates progress in implementing the Protocol on the basis of summary reports in accordance with article 7, paragraph 6. The objectives of these triennial summary reports are:

(a) To assess progress by means of self-assessment by the Party and assessment by the Meeting of the Parties;

(b) To exchange experience and share lessons learned;

(c) To illustrate successes resulting from the implementation of the Protocol;

(d) To identify challenges in implementing the Protocol, with a view to informing activities under the Protocol’s programme of work.

2. The summary reports do not aim to compare the situations in different Parties.

3. In accordance with article 7, paragraph 1 (b), the summary reports contain information on common indicators intended to show how far progress has contributed towards preventing, controlling and reducing water-related disease and to improving the water, sanitation and health situation in the region.

4. The aims of these guidelines are as follows:

(a) To assist Parties in meeting their commitments under article 7 of the Protocol;

(b) To promote the provision of consistent, transparent, accurate and complete information in order to enable a thorough review and assessment of the implementation of the Protocol by the Parties;

(c) To assist the Meeting of the Parties in carrying out its responsibilities to review the progress in implementation of the Protocol pursuant to article 7, paragraph 6.

5. These guidelines are complementary to and should be read together with the Guidelines on the Setting of Targets, Evaluation of Progress and Reporting,1 in particular regarding the setting of targets and the identification of indicators to measure progress.

Structure

6. Parties should structure their summary reports according to the template adopted by the Meeting of the Parties. To ensure completeness, no mandatory element should be excluded. If mandatory elements cannot be reported for any reason, Parties should explain the omission or the reason for partial reporting in the section relating to that element.

7. The summary reports should be useful for the self-assessment of Parties (e.g., they should encourage Parties to think about the process, the circumstances and “what is behind the figures”). Thus, in addition to figures, reports should include explanatory narratives that could be of use for other Parties, for instance addressing information on legal, regulatory, financial, informational, educational and management measures.

1 United Nations publication, Sales No. E.10.II.E.12. Available from

http://www.unece.org/index.php?id=11644 (accessed on 14 April 2016).

2

8. Parties are requested to concentrate on, where possible, the following types of information:

(a) The rationale and justification for establishing specific targets;

(b) The outcomes and impacts of actions or measures taken to implement the targets set and other provisions of the Protocol;

(c) Short descriptions of success stories and case studies that could serve as examples of good practice for other Parties;

(d) Major obstacles encountered in implementation;

(e) Actions needed to enhance implementation.

9. The summary reports will be composed of an executive summary providing an overall evaluation of the progress achieved in implementing the Protocol and the following seven parts:

(a) A general part on the process of setting targets and reporting and national circumstances;

(b) Information on targets and target dates set and assessment of progress achieved towards the targets;

(c) Information on common indicators;

(d) Information on water-related disease surveillance and response systems in accordance with article 8 of the Protocol;

(e) An overall evaluation of progress achieved in implementing articles 9-14 of the Protocol;

(f) A thematic part linked to priority areas of work under the Protocol;

(g) Information on the person submitting the report.

10. The summary reports should not exceed 50 pages.

Preparation process

11. Parties are encouraged to consider the participation of all concerned governmental sectors and departments, as well as other relevant stakeholders, in the preparation and use of the summary reports, including non-governmental organizations, civil society, local communities, the private sector and the media.

12. The person or authority responsible for preparing the summary report is encouraged to work closely with the national counterparts responsible for implementation of related international conventions and the acquis communautaire of the European Union. Coordinating report preparation will ensure the sharing of data and analysis as well as consistency between reports, thus reducing the overall reporting burden for the country while maintaining consistency with the reporting format. Such coordination could furthermore enhance opportunities for synergies in the national implementation of related international conventions and European Union directives.

Outreach and communication

13. The preparation of summary reports is an opportunity for communicating the work achieved in meeting the Protocol’s objectives to the general public and other stakeholders, including the private sector, and involving them in national implementation. To this end, in

3

addition to involving stakeholders in the preparation of summary reports, it is particularly important for Parties, after submitting their summary reports, to communicate to the general public the positive outcomes identified in the reports and the obstacles and challenges that remain.

14. Various means of communication can be used, including (a) publicly launching the summary reports on World Water Day, World Health Day or World Toilet Day, for example; (b) making the reports accessible to a wider audience through national clearing-house mechanisms, other media or on dedicated Internet sites; and/or (c) developing and disseminating extracts of the national reports.

Language

15. The summary report should be submitted in one of the official languages of the Protocol. To facilitate exchange of experience, Parties are also encouraged to submit, where relevant, a translation of their summary report in English.

Submission

16. Parties are required to submit their summary reports to the joint secretariat, using the adopted template for reporting, 210 days before the next session of the Meeting of the Parties. Submission of the reports ahead of this deadline is encouraged, as this will facilitate the preparation of analyses and syntheses of the reports for the consideration of the Meeting of the Parties.

17. Parties are requested to submit, to the two addresses below, an original signed copy by post and an electronic copy by e-mail. Electronic copies should be available in word- processing software.

Joint Secretariat to the Protocol on Water and Health

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Palais des Nations 1211 Geneva 10 Switzerland (E-mail: [email protected])

World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe WHO European Centre for Environment and Health Platz der Vereinten Nationen 1 53113 Bonn Germany (E-mail: [email protected])

1

PARTY RESPONDENTS’ ORS MANUAL A guide to using the Online Reporting System

i

© 2024 United Nations Environment Programme This publication may be reproduced in whole or in part and in any form for educational or non-profit services without special permission from the copyright holder, provided acknowledgement of the source is made. The United Nations Environment Programme would appreciate receiving a copy of any publication that uses this publication as a source.

No use of this publication may be made for resale or any other commercial purpose whatsoever without prior permission in writing from the United Nations Environment Programme. Applications for such permission, with a statement of the purpose and extent of the reproduction, should be addressed to the Director, UNEP-WCMC, 219 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, CB3 0DL, UK. Disclaimers The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory or city or area or its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. For general guidance on matters relating to the use of maps in publications please go to http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/english/htmain.htm

Mention of a commercial company or product in this document does not imply endorsement by the United Nations Environment Programme or the authors. The use of information from this document for publicity or advertising is not permitted. Trademark names and symbols are used in an editorial fashion with no intention on infringement of trademark or copyright laws. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations Environment Programme. We regret any errors or omissions that may have been unwittingly made. © Maps, photos and illustrations as specified Suggested citation United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (2024). Party Respondents’ Manual: A guide to using the Online Reporting System. Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Production United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Acknowledgements The author of this report is: Jacinta Jackson. The author would like to thank the following people for their contributions in reviewing the document: Aude Caromel, Frances Davis, Rachael Adu Baffour, Roger Ingle, Leonardo Wong, Barbara Rodeghiero, Jerry Harrison, Neville Ash, Melissa de Kock, Nina Bhola and Daniela Guaras (all UNEP-WCMC).

ii

Contents Glossary ................................................................................................................................................. 1

Summary ............................................................................................................................................... 3

Need-to-know ........................................................................................................................................ 4

Your account..................................................................................................................................... 5

Language ........................................................................................................................................... 6

Accounts and Access .......................................................................................................................... 7

My Account ....................................................................................................................................... 7

Edit your account details ............................................................................................................ 7

Forgot password .......................................................................................................................... 7

Deactivate or transfer your account ......................................................................................... 7

Single Main Respondent account ............................................................................................. 8

Collaborators .................................................................................................................................... 8

Dashboard ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Answer ................................................................................................................................................. 12

Relevant goals/targets (DaRT) .................................................................................................... 12

Past answers .................................................................................................................................. 13

Suggested answers ....................................................................................................................... 13

Conditional questions ................................................................................................................... 14

Supporting documents ................................................................................................................. 14

Tips for answering questions ...................................................................................................... 14

Save .................................................................................................................................................. 15

Collaborate .......................................................................................................................................... 17

Add Collaborators .......................................................................................................................... 17

Assign questions to Collaborators .............................................................................................. 18

Review Collaborators’ answers ................................................................................................... 20

Contacting and reassigning Collaborators ................................................................................ 21

Submit .................................................................................................................................................. 23

Submitting the report .................................................................................................................... 23

Unable to submit ............................................................................................................................ 23

Unsubmit ......................................................................................................................................... 24

Party requests unsubmit .......................................................................................................... 24

Export PDF ...................................................................................................................................... 25

iii

Export attachments (ZIP) ............................................................................................................. 25

Trends & Analysis .............................................................................................................................. 26

Key information .................................................................................................................................. 28

User types ....................................................................................................................................... 28

Pages ............................................................................................................................................... 28

Key icons ......................................................................................................................................... 29

1

Glossary Term Meaning

ORS Online Reporting System. This is the name given to the website managed by UNEP-WCMC. Other Online Reporting Systems also exist, but “ORS” is the shorthand given to this website.

MEA

Multilateral environmental agreement. It is an international agreement concluded among three or more States, which aims to address environmental issues of global or regional concern (e.g. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), and the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats).

Secretariat

An MEA administrative body. As part of their role, they are responsible for performing functions assigned to it by the MEA or as requested by the decision-making body of the relevant MEA, which may include circulating and then collecting and analysing official reports on parties' progress in implementing the MEA.

Party Typically, a national government which has ratified or acceded to an MEA.

Main Respondent(s) An ORS user type. The main person/people ultimately responsible providing reports to an MEA secretariat on behalf of a party.

National Focal Point The key individual within the party who is the focal point for interaction between the secretariat and the party on implementation and associated reporting.

Collaborator

An ORS user type. It describes any individual who is invited by a Main Respondent to contribute and support completion of a report to an MEA. These ORS users can suggest answers for a report, but they cannot submit reports.

Report A final output (completed questionnaire) submitted to MEA secretariats by the Main Respondent.

Questionnaire The question-and-answer template viewed and completed by party respondents within the ORS. This becomes a 'report' at the point of submission.

DaRT (Data and Reporting Tool)

The “Data Reporting Tool for MEAs – DaRT” is a website which provides private and secure national working spaces for parties to effectively generate and enhance synergies in the field of knowledge and information management for national reporting to biodiversity-related conventions. This ORS shares data from finalized reports with DaRT, and it allows parties to access relevant parts of DaRT easily in order to look for data which may be useful to them in their reporting process.

2

Welcome

Welcome to the Online Reporting System (ORS) and to this manual.

The ORS has been developed to support parties reporting to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Its simple design and special features are intended to reduce the reporting burden for parties.

As a Main Respondent, you have overall responsibility for completing and submitting relevant reports to the MEA secretariat. You might be a national focal point or someone nominated to oversee and submit the report on behalf of a national focal point. You can work with Collaborators and use data from DaRT (the Data and Reporting Tool) or past answers which have been provided to help you, but only you have access to the main answer space to the questionnaire used to compile your report.

There are also additional features which you might find helpful for your party’s work in monitoring and implementation. For example, you can view graphs showing trends in your party’s report responses over multiple reporting cycles.

The ORS has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible. We recommend you read the ‘Summary’ and ‘Need-to-know' pages at a minimum. The rest of the guide can be consulted if you have any queries but is not mandatory prior to use of the ORS.

We hope this guide will be a useful starting point for any queries you have on how to use the system. If you have a query which has not been answered in this guide, please contact the relevant MEA secretariat you are reporting to.

We hope you enjoy using the Online Reporting System (ORS).

If you are a national focal point wanting to transfer your Main Respondent responsibilities to a proxy, please see ‘Deactivate or transfer your account’ in this guide.

3

Summary This page gives a summary of how to use the ORS. For more details on any of the below, please use the full contents of this guide.

Log In

My Account

Dashboard

Answer

Submit

• An account is set up for you by the MEA Secretariat. You will receive an invitation via email. Contact the MEA Secretariat if you think you should have an account but do not. You may need to check your email ‘Junk’ folder.

• Follow the link in the invitation email. If it is your first time logging in, you will be asked to set your password. Otherwise, enter the password you set previously.

• You can change the system language in the top right of the screen.

• You will arrive in the Dashboard area. Click ‘My Account’ in the top right. • Here, you can change your account details. You can also add Collaborators

(colleagues to support you in report completion) if you wish. • You can return to the ‘My Account’ page at any time.

• Select 'Dashboard' in the top right to return to the Dashboard. • Here, you can see all questionnaires/reports which your Party has been invited

to complete within the latest version of the ORS. • Select the title of the current questionnaire to get started. • Select an available language to view the questionnaire in. Click 'Save' to

continue. You will not be able to return to the ‘Language’ page.

• In the ‘Answer’ section, a collapsible guide will appear to support you. • Below that is an overview of the questionnaire structure. • Use 'Add Collaborator' to assign colleagues to support you on specific

questions/sections if you wish. Doing this will also give you an overview of the questionnaire.

• Select any question to get started. Progress by selecting ‘Next’. • Complete each question by selecting 'Save as final'. Below each question use

Suggested answers, Past answers, and Relevant goals/targets to help you.

• When you have completed the report (i.e. at least all mandatory questions have been answered and saved) you can prepare to submit the report.

• If you need to export the report for approvals, go to 'Submit' and then 'Export PDF'. You can return to the ‘Submit’ page to submit the report later.

• When you are confident the report is complete, go to the 'Submit' area, then read the information provided before selecting the 'Submit' button.

4

Need-to-know

This page contains need-to-know facts about how to use the system in the optimal way to support you.

Key facts For further details,

please see section in this manual

1 As a Main Respondent, you are the only person who can submit a report for your party.

Single Main Respondent account

2 The ORS permits one Main Respondent per party by default. Single Main

Respondent account

3 Report data will be shared to your party’s data space in the Data and Reporting Tool (www.dart.informea.org).

Relevant goals/targets (DaRT)

4 You can invite ‘Collaborators’ (colleagues) to support you in completing a report. They can suggest answers but cannot overwrite your report draft.

Add Collaborators

5 Collaborators must be added into the ‘My Account’ space before you can flag questions to them to request their support.

Add Collaborators

6 We recommend only ever adding to Collaborators’ assignments. This will enable the system to remember all assignments for the following reporting cycle.

Assign questions to Collaborators

7

Before report submission, all mandatory questions must be ‘saved as final’. When drafting the report in the ORS, answers can be ‘saved as draft’ or, by clicking an adjacent arrow, ‘saved as final’. Mandatory questions are indicated with a red asterisk.

Submit

8

You can export your report (e.g. for reviews and approvals) via the ‘Submit’ page. You can visit the ‘Submit’ page without needing to submit immediately. You can return later to submit.

Submit

9 It is possible for a submitted report to be reopened for edits if absolutely necessary. ORS refers to this as ‘Unsubmit’. It can be initiated either by you or by the Secretariat.

Unsubmit

10

The ORS illustrates report data submitted over multiple report cycles on graphs in the ‘Trends and Analysis’ page. ‘Trends and Analysis’ can be accessed via the top right of the ORS. . Only report data submitted via the (new version of the) ORS will be shown (i.e. it may take time for data to accumulate).

Trends and Analysis

11 Where possible, when you are leaving your role, please inform the Secretariat.

Deactivate or transfer your account

5

Getting started Your account

You will be invited to the MEA secretariat’s ORS (Online Reporting System) by email. Simply select the activation link given in the invitation email or copy and paste the link into your browser. This will open the ORS website, where you will be asked to complete the account set up by setting your password (as in the image below). This is true even if you had an account in the previous version of the ORS.

Please make sure this password is memorable, as you will be asked to provide it each time you log into the ORS website in the future.

If you cannot find the relevant invitation email (by searching your inbox for ‘ORS’) you may wish to check your email account’s Junk or Spam folder. If the invitation email still cannot be found, please contact the relevant secretariat.

If you have responsibility as a Main Respondent to more than one MEA, please note you will need to accept and set up separate accounts for each of their ORS websites.

If you had an account in an old ORS version, please note you will need to follow the invitation and set up a new account with a new password.

Once you have activated your account by setting a password, you will be able to enter the website at any time by using the ‘Sign in’ page. You can access this page from the invitation email, or by clicking ‘Sign in’ in the top right corner of the page accessed from the activation link. Use the email address at which you received the invitation email.

If you believe you should have access to the ORS but do not, please contact the relevant ORS secretariat.

6

Language

Go to the top right of the page to select which of the available UN languages you would like to use as the ORS access language. This will determine the language used for key website content (e.g. page titles, buttons, etc.).

The ‘preferred language’ you select in the ‘My Account’ space (accessible via the top right of the ORS webpage) will determine the language of automated email correspondence you will receive from the ORS (e.g. automated messages from the secretariat, deadline reminders, etc.).

When you open a questionnaire for the first time, you can choose in which of the available languages you would like to view the questionnaire content. If your preferred language does not appear, it is because the MEA secretariat has not provided a questionnaire in this language. Please choose the language you would feel most comfortable answering in. You can click on a questionnaire title (or go to ‘Actions’ > ‘View questionnaire’) in the Dashboard to open a questionnaire and start preparing your party’s report.

Once you have selected your questionnaire language, it cannot be changed. Any Collaborators you are working with will access the questionnaire in this language.

7

Accounts and Access My Account

Edit your account details

To edit your account details, go to ‘My Account’ (top right of the ORS website screen) and select ‘My Details’. Here, you can edit your account name, email address, password, and preferred language.

The ‘preferred language’ will determine the language of automated email correspondence you will receive from the ORS (e.g. automated messages from the secretariat, deadline reminders, etc.).

Forgot password

If you forget your password, you can re-set it by selecting ‘Forgot password?’ on the main Sign In page, then entering the email address associated with your account.

If you can’t remember which email address was associated with your account, trying searching your email inboxes for ‘ORS’ to find the most recent emails sent to you by the system.

Deactivate or transfer your account The person responsible for report submission may change between reporting cycles.

If you think you might remain as the Main Respondent responsible for the next reporting cycle, there is nothing else you need to do. Your account will continue to be accessible to you even after the reporting deadline.

If responsibility for reporting is being transferred to someone else in the next reporting cycle, you may wish to ensure they are given an account in the ORS and that your account is deactivated.

To do this, please:

1. Inform the relevant MEA secretariat you will no longer be the Main Respondent. 2. If possible, provide the secretariat with the details (name and email address) of the new,

incoming Main Respondent.

The secretariat will inform you of any other requirements.

8

If you are working across reports for multiple different MEAs, deactivation of your account in ORS for one MEA will not affect your account with other MEAs in the ORS. Equally, if you or any colleagues of yours are contributing to reports as ‘Collaborators’ (please see ‘Collaborate’ in this manual), this ORS access will be managed separately by the Main Respondent(s) of the relevant MEAs. If you expect you should be given access to a report as a Collaborator (i.e. a contributor without the responsibility of submitting the final report), please contact the relevant Main Respondent to request they provide you with access.

If you continue to receive emails from the ORS when you believe you shouldn’t, please contact the relevant MEA secretariat with UNEP-WCMC’s address ([email protected]) in CC.

Single Main Respondent account

By default, your party has one Main Respondent. The Main Respondent has overall responsibility for the submission of a report.

Depending on the secretariat’s approach, it may be possible to request the MEA secretariat to facilitate multiple Main Respondent accounts by sending them an email to explain why. If you are a National Focal Point who wants to give responsibility for report completion to a colleague, you may wish to follow one of these options:

a) Add Collaborator: Add your colleague as a Collaborator (see ‘Add Collaborators’ in this guide). They will be able to suggest answers but not submit the report.

b) Transfer: Transfer the Main Respondent role/account to your colleague (see above). You can be provided with access as a Collaborator, if you wish. Simply request your colleague acting as the Main Respondent to provide you access by sending you an invitation to collaborate. You would then receive the invitation via email to access the ORS. More information on this can be found under ‘Collaborate’ in this manual.

c) Request: Request multiple Main Respondents by sending an email to the secretariat. It is at the discretion of individual MEA secretariats to decide whether to apply this customised setting.

Before sending an email request for multiple Main Respondent accounts to the relevant MEA secretariat, please be aware of your ability to use the following:

• Export PDF copies of the report (others can review copies of the report). • Use the ‘Collaborator’ function (an unlimited number of colleagues can be invited to provide

answers for the report).  Collaborators can suggest answers, see other Collaborators’ answers, and view the

whole questionnaire.  Collaborators cannot consolidate/overwrite answers in the main report, nor submit

reports.

Collaborators Please see the ‘Collaborate’ section in this guide for more information about Collaborators.

9

Dashboard The dashboard is your starting point for accessing different questionnaires and reports. See the image below for explanations of different parts of the dashboard.

Dashboard (annotated)

Label Name Description

1 Dashboard

The Dashboard is the page you can see here. It shows all questionnaires which have ever been shared on the ORS with your party by the secretariat. You can go back to the Dashboard at any time by selecting this.

2 Trends & Analysis

The Trends & Analysis pages illustrate data from different reports within graphs. After your party has submitted multiple reports for the same report type, you will be able to track changes over time using these pages.

3 My Account The My Account pages enable you to manage your ORS account, as well as view any Collaborators your party is working or has worked with to support report completion.

4 Contact Secretariat

Use this button to draft emails to the secretariat if you have queries or concerns which cannot be resolved through this guide.

5 Sign out

You can sign in and out of the ORS at any time by using the password you created, and the email address associated with your account. Unless you have changed this, this will be the email account to which you received the invitation email to the ORS. Your questionnaire

1 v

2 v

3 v

4 v

6 v

8 v

9 v

10

5

7 v 11

12

13

14

10

progress will always be saved (please remember to select ‘save as draft’ or ‘save as final’ for individual questions to ensure this).

6 Language

The language used by the ORS website can be changed by using this button. Choose one of the UN languages available. To change the language you receive automated emails in, instead edit your account details under ‘My Account’. The language in which you view each questionnaire is instead determined by the language selected from the Welcome page when a questionnaire is first opened.

7 All questionnaires

This table shows all questionnaires ever shared with your party through the ORS to facilitate reporting. Select the title of each column of the table to reorder questionnaires by the topic of that title.

8 Questionnaire title

Questionnaires can be opened by selecting the Questionnaire title. Questionnaires which are “not started” or “in progress” can be viewed and edited by selecting the Questionnaire title, while “submitted” questionnaires can only be viewed.

9 Creation date

Items in this column show the date a questionnaire was created by the secretariat in the format YYYY-MM (Year-Month). Select the arrow toggle by the column title to order the questionnaire list by creation date.

10 Deadline

Items in this column show the final permitted submission day for completed questionnaires (reports) in the format YYY-MM-DD (Year- Month-Day). Reports should be submitted any time before this date. Select the arrow toggle by the column title to order the questionnaire list by the deadline.

11 Status

A questionnaire can have one of these possible statuses:

- Not started – The questionnaire has not been opened. Select the questionnaire title to get started.

- In progress – The questionnaire is underway. This means the questionnaire has been opened by the Main Respondent. However, it does not necessarily mean they have started drafting responses. For the progress bar to increase from 0%, at least one of the mandatory questions must be “saved as final”.

- Submitted – The report (completed questionnaire) has been submitted to the MEA secretariat. This is the target status which your party should be aiming to reach.

- Unsubmit requested – Your party has requested that the report submission be reversed so the questionnaire can be reopened for further edits. If the secretariat approves the request, the questionnaire status will return to ‘In progress’.

12 Progress

The progress bar shows what percentage of mandatory questions have been ‘saved as final’. You can use this to track your progress in completing the questionnaire. Please note that non-mandatory questions and questions ‘saved as draft’ will not be included in the calculation used for the progress bar.

13 Search Type into the Search field to identify questionnaires from words in their title.

11

14 Actions

By selecting the actions button, you can choose to:

- View questionnaire – Select this option to view the questionnaire (an alternative to selecting the questionnaire title)

- Export o Selecting this will take you to the ‘Submit‘ page. On

this page, you can export a copy of your report. If you are not ready to submit your report yet, don’t worry, you can export a copy of your report before returning later to submit.

o Select ‘Export report (PDF)’ to export a PDF of the report.

o Select ‘Export attachments (ZIP)’ to export a folder containing all the attachments (supporting documents) used in the report).

- Request unsubmit – Select this to request the questionnaire be reopened for edits. This option will only appear if the report has been submitted. For more information, please see ‘Unsubmit’ (in this guide).

12

Answer As the Main Respondent, you have the responsibility to compile and submit your party’s report. No one else can access, edit, or overwrite your answers (which constitute the main draft for the report) or submit the report. If you are working with Collaborators, for example, they can see the questions and suggest answers, but they cannot view, edit, or overwrite your answers (the main draft). This applies unless your party has sought special permission from the MEA secretariat – please see ‘Single Main Respondent account’ in this guide).

This section explains the contents of the ‘Answer’ space and some ORS features which you can use to make the reporting experience quicker and easier.

Please note: The more up-to-date the information you provide in the report, the better the opportunities for monitoring and implementation of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements your party is submitting a report in relation to. MEA secretariats using this ORS will use the answers you submit to develop relevant plans and support.

There are resources available to support you in completing reports. Please review the following to find out more:

- Relevant goals/targets (DaRT) - Past answers - Suggested answers - Collaborate [Manage collaborators question by question]

Relevant goals/targets (DaRT)

You can access data available in DaRT (the Data and Reporting Tool) which might be relevant to the questions in the report. To do so, simply click any goal/target buttons which appear under a question. The Data and Reporting Tool will open in a new window, showing a page with data which has been tagged as potentially relevant. You may need to log in to the Tool. Here is an example of the button you might see underneath a question in the ORS to take you to relevant pages in DaRT:

If you don’t see this button below a question, it is because the MEA secretariat has not included it for this question. You can still check for any relevant data in the Data and Reporting Tool by going to https://dart.informea.org/user/login.

Data you submit via reports will also appear in your party’s own workspace in DaRT if you have one, once the secretariat has “finalized” the questionnaire.

This means that any data submitted to any MEA via ORS can be retrieved for other reports in ORS, including reports submitted to other MEAs using the ORS.

13

This should bring benefits such as:

- Less time spent looking for data to answer the questionnaire. - More streamlined and synergised responses across reports to different MEAs. - Automated building of a data repository for your party within DaRT.

Past answers

Underneath each question, you may see an area labelled ‘Past answers’. These are answers which have been provided to that question in past reports. If no past answers are shown, this might be a new question for this reporting cycle. Or it might be the MEA secretariat’s first time using the updated version of the ORS.

These past answers are shown for context. We advise against directly reusing the answer for this reporting cycle unless you are certain that the answer has not changed.

To copy the past answer into the main answer space for editing, select the ‘Copy and replace’ button ( ) available for most question types. For text answers, you will instead need to copy and paste the answer manually by highlighting text, clicking Ctrl+C on your keyboard, then going to the main answer space and selecting Ctrl+V on your keyboard.

Suggested answers

Underneath each question, you might see a box labelled ‘Suggested answers’. These are answers which have been provided by Collaborators.

If a Collaborator submits a suggested answer for the same question multiple times, their newest answer will always replace and overwrite their previous suggested answer (in the ‘Suggested answers’ space only – this does not affect the main answer space).

If the box is empty, this might be:

• Because you have not invited Collaborators to the report to support you. For more information on how to add collaborators, see ‘Add Collaborators’ (in this guide).

• Because you have not invited Collaborators to this specific question to support you. For more information on how to invite Collaborators to support you on a specific question, see ‘Assign questions to Collaborators’ (in this guide).

DaRT data use example: a Main Respondent submits a report to an MEA (A) Secretariat in 2024. A Main Respondent from the same party, completing a report for MEA (B) can retrieve this data from DaRT the same year to help inform their report. The data continues to be stored and remains accessible to other party representatives in the future via DaRT, without any further effort from the Main Respondent.

14

• Because the Collaborators you invited to support you have not provided answers yet. For more information on how to send Collaborators a reminder request to answer a question, see ‘Contacting and reassigning Collaborators’ (in this guide).

Conditional questions

Conditional questions are questions which you may or may not need to answer, depending on how you answer preceding questions.

For example, if you answer ‘Yes’ to a question, there might be 5 other questions which become relevant. If you answer ‘No’, those questions will not be relevant, so will remain hidden.

All questions relevant to you will eventually be shown, so there is no need to worry about missing any questions.

A button in the Questionnaire structure can be selected to toggle whether these conditional questions are shown or hidden: it looks like an eye. Selecting the button will reveal the conditional questions.

You may wish to preview the conditional questions in the early stages when you are assessing the questionnaire length and deciding how to collaborate with others on various sections. It is an optional feature, and you are welcome to complete the report without using it.

Collaborators will be able to see conditional questions but, as with all questionnaire parts, they will only be flagged to Collaborators if you choose to assign them.

Supporting documents

For some questions, you will be able to provide supporting documents as part of your answer. If so, you might see one or both of the following icons to the top right of a question:

Attach file

Select this button to attach files such as Word documents, PDFs, or jpeg images to your answer. Repeat to add more files.

Attach URL link

Select this button to attach weblinks (e.g. www.ors.ngo) to your answer. Repeat to add more weblinks.

If you see only one or neither of these icons by a question, it is because the secretariat has not enabled them for that question.

Tips for answering questions

The following tips for answering questions might be useful:

✓ Click an answer option (e.g. multiple-choice checkbox) once to select it. Click again to remove the selection.

15

✓ Use the ‘Clear’ button to remove all selections and clear all answers for single-selection multiple-choice questions.

✓ If the answer to a question is “0”, “none”, or “not applicable”, please enter these as an answer (according to the requirements of the question), rather than leave fields blank. This will help the secretariat to understand your response more clearly.

✓ If you feel none of the available answers apply, or the question is not possible to answer accurately due to the way it is constructed, please contact the secretariat by using the ‘Contact Secretariat’ link in the top right of the page in the ORS.

Useful icons:

A speech bubble icon in the Questionnaire structure indicates Collaborator(s) have shared unread suggested answers for this question. It may be overridden by the orange exclamation icon if the question is mandatory and its answer has not been saved as final.

The blue number counters in the Questionnaire structure indicate how many questions require your attention. The count includes unanswered mandatory questions as well as new suggested answers (see above). Mandatory questions will be counted in this total until they are ‘saved as final’.

An orange exclamation icon indicates a mandatory question which has not yet been saved as final (see the ‘Save’ guidance section). All mandatory questions must be ‘saved as final’ before you can submit a report.

A green tick/check mark will appear next to questions you have saved as final. This helps you to track your progress in completing the report. Please note: If a Collaborator suggests a new answer, this icon will be replaced with the speech bubble icon until re-saved as final.

The eye icon by the Questionnaire structure reveals or hides conditional questions when selected. For more information, please see ‘Conditional questions’ in this guide.

Save

Saving your answers ensures your report contents are kept safe and that it is easy to keep track of your progress. Each time you save an answer, you are re-saving the entire report.

If you are the only Main Respondent for your party, it is not possible for anyone else, including Collaborators, to overwrite the content you add to the report.

If there is more than one Main Respondent for your party to the relevant MEA, please be aware that if you are working on the report at the same time, you might overwrite each other’s answers. (There will not be more than one Main Respondent unless you have requested it.)

‘Save as draft’ to save your progress and return to a question later.

16

‘Save as final’ to save your answer in its final state (i.e. if you think further edits are unlikely). ‘Save as final’ helps you to track your progress in completing the report (see below). You can access ‘Save as final’ by clicking on the arrow next to ‘Save as draft’. You must save all mandatory questions as final to submit a report.

A green tick/check mark will appear next to questions you have saved as final. This helps you to track your progress in completing the report.

After you ’Save as final’, you can still edit an answer if you wish. Simply select ‘Unlock’ to edit. After this, you will need to ’Save as final’ again.

17

Collaborate Collaborators are colleagues you invite to support you in completing the questionnaire. This can have benefits such as:

- High quality report responses from different experts. - Reduced time burden for you in completing a report. - Ability for you to review and edit different suggested content for the report with ease,

without concern that answers will overwrite each other. Please note that Collaborators cannot submit reports or edit the main answering space which you control. They can see suggestions made by other Collaborators but cannot edit them. They can only submit suggestions.

Notably, Collaborators can see only the questionnaires which you have invited them to, but they cannot access any other questionnaires or parts of the ORS. Furthermore, they cannot invite anyone else to contribute to the questionnaire. As a Main Respondent, you have full control over any Collaborators’ access to the questionnaires overseen by your party.

There are multiple ways you can provide, edit, or remove Collaborators’ access to the ORS, as described in the following sub-sections.

Add Collaborators

Before you can assign questions to Collaborators you must ‘add’ them to the ORS.

How to... Reference image

Add Collaborators

- Go to ‘My Account’ (top right corner of screen).

- Select ‘Collaborators’. - Select ‘+Add’. - Enter the Collaborator’s name, email

address, and preferred language. The ‘Preferred language’ setting indicates which language Collaborators will receive any automated emails in. This does not affect the language of the questionnaire: All Collaborators will be shown the questionnaire in whichever language you select when opening the questionnaire for the first time.

18

Edit Collaborator details

- Go to ‘My Account’ (top right corner of screen).

- Select ‘Collaborators’. - Select a Collaborator’s name to edit their

details. - To remove a Collaborator’s access to all

ORS reports, go to ‘Actions’ then select ‘Delete’.

Once Collaborators have been added to the ORS, they can then be assigned questions in any questionnaire.

Collaborators will not have access to the ORS until they are assigned questions in a questionnaire. They can only access questionnaires in which they have been assigned questions.

Assign questions to Collaborators

This section describes how you can flag specific questions for Collaborators’ attention (and facilitate their access to a questionnaire).

If the person you want support from as a Collaborator has never used the ORS before, you will need to add them to the system before you can start the process below. See the instructions on how to ‘Add Collaborators’ in this guide.

Collaborators may have been added by you or by previous Main Respondents from your party. We recommend you contact these individuals outside of the ORS (e.g. via email) to check if they would be happy to support you in completing a report before assigning them to provide answers.

Once you have followed these steps, you are ready to start assigning questions to Collaborators.

How to... Reference images

Assign questions to Collaborators

- Ensure you have added the Collaborators

to the ORS (see above). - Select the relevant questionnaire. Ensure

you have completed the ‘Language’ step and are in the ‘Answer’ space.

- At the top of the ‘Answer’ page, select click the button which says ‘Assign Collaborator’.

- Select a Collaborator you would like to support you.

19

- Select the checkboxes next to a question, section, or sub-section to assign it to the Collaborator.

- When you have finished your selections, select ‘Next’.

- Customise the message which the Collaborator will receive.

- Select ‘Send’. - Repeat as necessary.

The Collaborator will receive an email with a link inviting them to open the ORS and review the questions you selected. The questions you assigned will be flagged within the questionnaire copy they receive. If a checkbox next to a question is empty at the selection stage, the Collaborator will not be asked to provide an answer to that question. However, they will still be able to view the question and suggest answers if they want. Click a selected checkbox to remove the check and the assignment. You can set the Collaborator additional or repeat assignments at a later date, but they will only be notified of completely new assignments. For repeat assignments (i.e. flagging the same question to them more than once, including after they have suggested an answer), we recommend you include a note in your message to say which questions you would like them to answer. For more information, please see ‘Contacting and Reassigning Collaborators’ in this manual.

Apply assignments from a previous reporting cycle

- At the top of the ‘Answer’ page, select the

button which says ‘Assign Collaborator’. - Select a Collaborator you would like to

support you. - Select the ‘Copy previous report

assignments’ button If this option does not appear, or if no questions are selected, it’s because they were not assigned any questions in the previous reporting cycle, because the secretariat has not enabled the connection, or

20

because this is the first time the MEA has used the ORS.

Example: Collaborator assignments

In the example below, the Collaborator selected is Edward Aderson. Edward Aderson has been assigned:

- Some of the questions from the section ‘National level information’ o Questions 1 & 2 o Not question 3.

- No questions in ‘Conservation and habitat’ - Some or all questions in ‘Human-wildlife conflict’ and ‘Research and monitoring’ (these

sections can be expanded for more information.

Using the ‘Assign Collaborator’ button described above is the fastest way to request a collaborator to support you in suggesting answers for multiple questions at once.

Review Collaborators’ answers

After you have assigned question to a Collaborator, they will receive an email with a link inviting them to open the ORS and review the questions you selected. The questions you assigned will be flagged within the questionnaire copy they receive. They can now suggest answers for the questions you have assigned to them (as well as questions which have not been assigned to them, if they wish) .

Key steps in accessing Collaborators’ suggested answers:

1. Identify: When Collaborators submit answers to questions which have already been saved as final or which are not mandatory, you will see a speech bubble icon ( ) next to the question they have provided an answer for.

21

• However, the system prioritises highlighting unanswered mandatory questions to you via the (!) icon. This overrides the speech bubble icon. Therefore, you may wish to ask Collaborators to let you know when they have submitted most or all answers.

• As soon as Collaborators suggest answers, these answers will appear in the question space under ‘Suggested answers’ (regardless of the icon shown in the questionnaire structure on the left side).

2. View: Open each answer using the blue arrows ( ) in the ’Suggested answers’ section. 3. Use responses:

• Copy and replace: If you select ‘Copy and replace‘, the Collaborator‘s answer will replace whatever is in the main answer space (at the top of the page).

• Copy: If you select ‘Copy‘ ( ), you can copy the Collaborator’s answer to paste it into the main answer space (at the top of the page) without deleting any existing contents. Click Ctrl+V on your keyboard to paste the answer into the textbox.

4. (Contact Collaborator) - Optionally, use the ‘Contact Collaborator’ button ( ) to draft an email to the Collaborator. Clicking the button will open a template email with a reference to the question, link to the question, and space for you to provide added text (e.g. requests, descriptions, questions).

As the Main Respondent, you are responsible for collating all answers to the report in the main answer space for each question and saving each one as ‘final’. Collaborators can view the questionnaire and suggest answers, but they cannot directly modify the report contents.

Collaborators’ submission of answers will never mean other Collaborators’ answers are overwritten. Collaborators’ answers will not enter the main report unless you copy the contents into the main answer space.

Collaborators can view any suggested answers submitted by other Collaborators.

Contacting and reassigning Collaborators

The ‘Contact Collaborator’ button appears next to Collaborators’ suggested answers. To contact a Collaborator about a specific question, select the ‘Contact Collaborator’ button (next to their suggested answer for that question). A pre-filled email to the Collaborator will appear with a clickable link to the specific question you have a comment or query about.

You can assign or re-assign questions to Collaborators at any time within a reporting cycle by selecting ‘Assign collaborators’ at the top of the page in ‘Answer’ (see ‘Assign questions to Collaborators’ in this guide).

When re-assigning questions to Collaborators for a single report, we recommend you:

• Include a note in your message to say which questions you would like them to answer.  Any new questions you have assigned to them will be flagged, but questions to

which they have already answered will not be flagged.  For this reason, if assigning questionnaire part(s) to a Collaborator for a

second/third/fourth time, please use the custom message (which appears before

22

sending assignments) to specify which questions you would like them to pay attention to.

 Alternatively, you can use the ‘Contact Collaborator’ function (available via a button next to their suggested answer) to draw their attention to specific questions (a reference to the question will appear in the email to the Collaborator automatically, alongside space for a custom message).

• Only ever add to the Collaborator’s assignments, not remove them  Whoever is the Main Respondent for the report next year will be able to review and

apply the same questions to a Collaborator as they were assigned the previous reporting cycle, if they wish. The system will refer only to whichever batch of assignments were assigned most recently.

 For this reason, if assigning additional questions to a Collaborator within a single reporting cycle, we advise you to include the sum total of all assignments for that year.

▪ For example, if a Collaborator has already answered questions 1 and 2 which you assigned them during this reporting cycle, but you now wish you assign question 3 for them in addition, we recommend you assign questions 1, 2, and 3 to them. This will enable the system to record all the Collaborator’s assignments to be used through ‘Copy previous report assignments’ in the following reporting cycle. This will not cause confusion for the Collaborator: Only questionnaire parts which they have not provided answers for will be flagged to them.

23

Submit

Once you have completed all mandatory questions and answered as many other questions as possible, you may be ready to submit the report. You can use this section to guide you through what to do.

Submitting the report Once you have completed all mandatory questions and answered as many other questions as possible, you may be ready to submit the report.

There are a few key things to check before you submit:

✓ All necessary questions are completed: At minimum, you should have completed all mandatory questions.

 To check this, go to the Dashboard. If the report status is ‘In progress’ and the progress indicator shows ‘100%’, this means the report is ready to submit.

 Alternatively, you can check this by going to the ‘Answer’ space for the relevant questionnaire. In the ‘Questionnaire structure’ area (to the left), there should be no blue counters next to sections. These blue counters indicate the number of mandatory questions in that section which have not had an answer ‘saved as final’. These questions are further indicated via an orange (!) icon.

 You might see some questions still show the speech bubble icon ( ), even though their answers have been ‘saved as final’. These will not prevent you from submitting. (If you would prefer to remove them for any reason, you can select ‘Unlock’ on the relevant questions and then ‘Save as final’ again).

 Not all questions must be completed, but all mandatory questions must be completed.

 Please also complete your own review to decide whether the report is ready to submit.

✓ Any internal permissions have been approved: Internal approvals are at the discretion of you and your party. A version of the report which you can share with internal stakeholders for approval is accessible on the ‘Submit’ space for the questionnaire. To access this:

 If you are within the report space (having accessed it via the Dashboard), click on ‘Submit’ (via the top banner) and click ‘Export PDF’.

 Alternatively, go to the Dashboard, click on the ‘Actions’ button ( ) for the relevant report, and click ‘Export’. Then select ‘Export report (PDF)’.

✓ There are no errors: Check that everything in the report is correct.

When all of these conditions have been met, click on ‘Submit’ in the banner at the top of the page. Review the confirmation statement before selecting the checkbox and submitting.

Unable to submit

Are you seeing this message?

24

The report cannot be submitted because not all mandatory questions have been answered and saved. This means there are some unanswered mandatory questions. You cannot submit the report until these questions have been completed.

To locate these questions, review the ‘Questionnaire structure’ on the left of the ‘Answer’ screen. Any questions highlighted with the orange ‘!’ icon - - must be answered and then ‘Save as final’ must be selected using the blue save button:

The blue counters will show how many mandatory questions which have not been saved as final need your attention (e.g. “ ” indicates that three mandatory questions within that section have not been saved as final).

To send reminders to Collaborators to ask them to provide answers to these questions, use the ‘Contact Collaborator’ feature (see ‘Contacting and reassigning Collaborators’ in this guide).

If you have located the missed questions but you feel it is not possible or appropriate to provide an answer, please inform the MEA secretariat of this by clicking the ‘Contact Secretariat’ button in the top right of the page and explaining the issue via the email provided.

Unsubmit

Party requests unsubmit

If you have submitted your report and subsequently feel some changes are necessary, you may send the MEA secretariat a request to ‘unsubmit’ the report (i.e. reverse the report submission and reopen the questionnaire). You will then be able to make modifications and resubmit.

Please ensure you are confident that a submission reversal is necessary before you request to ‘unsubmit’ a report.

To request the report be ‘unsubmitted’, go to the Dashboard. For the relevant questionnaire, please

click the button under ’Actions’ ( ). Select ’Request unsubmit’ and explain the reason for the request. The secretariat will then review your request to unsubmit. You will be notified of their response via email. They may accept or reject requests to unsubmit reports.

Secretariat unsubmits

The secretariat might unsubmit your report and request changes. If this happens, you will be notified via email and the secretariat will explain next steps clearly. You will need to make changes based on

25

their request and then re-submit the report in the same way as described in the section of this guide: ‘Submitting the report’.

Export PDF You can export a PDF copy of your report at any time.

Go to Dashboard → Actions → Export → Export report (PDF).

Exporting a PDF of your report will not affect the submission of your report. You will be able to export PDFs at any time, either before or after submission. You can choose to export the report with only answered questions (this file will be smaller and quicker to download) or the full questionnaire (containing all questions and any answers, whether answered or not).

Export attachments (ZIP) You can export a ZIP copy of the attachments in your report at any time.

Go to Dashboard → Quick links → Export → Export attachments (ZIP).

26

Trends & Analysis

The ORS allows you to visualise your party’s report data across different reporting cycles. This should make it easier to identify key trends and can play a valuable role in supporting monitoring and implementation of multilateral environmental agreements.

Only you and selected members of the secretariat will be able to view your party’s report data in this way.

Please note, you can also download PDF versions of your report – along with ZIP files of the report attachments – via the Dashboard page (select ‘Export’ from the actions button for the relevant report).

How to… Reference images

Visualise results of multiple reporting cycles for the same questionnaire type

• Select ‘Trends & Analysis’ from the top right of the

ORS. • Use ‘Filter by: Questionnaire’ to select the

questionnaire titles of the reporting cycles you want to visualise. Please ensure you select the same questionnaire type (i.e. questionnaires containing the same questions).

• Select a question from the ‘Questionnaire structure’. This is the question whose answers will be visualised.

• You will be shown raw answers first. Click the blue arrows to expand or collapse each answer.

• For some question types, you will be shown a ‘Select chart’ button. Use the ‘Select chart’ menu to select a chart to view.

• For more complex chart types, you will be given the option to use the tabs above a graph to toggle between data from different reports. The tabs are labelled using the creation date for the questionnaire which led to that report.

• Optional: Select any variable from the Legend to exclude it from the graph. Hover over each bar for further information.

Different visualisation types are available for different question types. We hope to provide other visualisation types in the future. Here are the visualisation types currently available:

27

Visualisation types

Explanation Available for

question types:

Raw answers

All answers from your party (from the report(s) selected) are shown. Use the blue arrows to expand or collapse the view of each answer. ‘Text’ question types only have this visualisation available due to the long-form, qualitative nature of the answers to this question type.

All question types

Bar chart

This simple bar chart shows your party’s responses to numeric questions for each of the reports selected. The date shown is the questionnaire creation date for the report(s) selected.

Numeric

Bar chart (by option)

This bar chart shows answer options on its X axis. E.g. specific options from a multiple-choice or rank question, or specific column/row combinations from a matrix question. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

All except Numeric, Text, or Matrix Text

Bar chart (by column)

This bar chart shows column titles from the matrix on its X axis. This bar chart type is applicable for matrix questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Matrix checkbox, Matrix single-select

Bar chart (by row)

This bar chart shows row titles from the matrix on its X axis. This bar chart type is applicable for matrix questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Matrix checkbox, Matrix single-select

Bar chart (by Party)

This bar chart shows answer options in the legend. This bar chart type is applicable for multiple-choice questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Multiple-choice

Bar chart (by rank)

This bar chart shows the ranking positions on its X axis. This bar chart type is applicable for rank questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Rank

28

Key information User types The Online Reporting System (ORS) is a secure system which is used by 3 core user types. These user types are referred to throughout this guide. They are as follows:

User type Core abilities Notes

(Main) Respondent

Submit reports. Invite Collaborators to support report completion. Change account details.

- If you are reading this guide, we expect this is your role.

- A Main Respondent can be a National Focal Point (NFP), or someone selected to complete a report on behalf of an NFP.

- Each party is associated with 1 Main Respondent account by default.

Collaborator

‘Suggests’ answers to questions to support Main Respondent Can see all questions.

- You can invite colleagues to support you in completing the report. They will be sent an automatic email containing a unique and secure link to the questionnaire.

- Please see the ‘Collaborate’ section in this guide for more information.

Secretariat

Create, edit, publish, and view results of reports (old or new). Create and edit Respondent accounts.

- Contacts from the relevant MEA secretariat will be your first point of contact if you have any queries which are not answered by this guide.

- The MEA secretariat collects the reports you submit to monitor and support implementation of the relevant MEA.

Pages The ORS is made up of just 5 key areas. Below is a brief guide to what you can achieve in each area:

Page What the Main Respondent can do in this page

My Account • Edit basic account details. • Add/Edit/Delete Collaborators.

Trends & Analysis

• View your party’s answers to individual questions across multiple reporting cycles.

• Determine trends over time using graphic illustrations of you party’s answers to reports over time.

29

Dashboard • View and access questionnaires. • View questionnaire status, progress, and deadline.

Language • Set questionnaire language (The system language can be set in the top right of every screen).

Answer • Assign Collaborators to sections/questions of the questionnaire (including copying assignments from previous reporting cycle, if relevant).

• View questionnaire progress. • Move between questions via the ‘Next’ button or the Questionnaire

structure. • Use Collaborators’ answers, previous answers, and DaRT data to inform

answers. • ‘Copy’ Collaborators’ answers (to move them into the main answer

space additively, so that multiple collaborators’ answers can be copied manually into the same answer) or ‘copy and replace’ (to replace whatever is in the answer space with a single answer)

• Enter answers. • Use rich text for text answers. • Save as draft or Save as final. • Understand why submitting the questionnaire is not possible (quicky

view questions which have missing answers). • Flag any issues with individual questions to the secretariat.

Submit • Confirm responsibility for, and accuracy of, report. • Export a copy of report as a PDF and any attachments as ZIP. • Request ‘unsubmit’ (submission reversal) of submitted reports.

Key icons

Icon Title Explanation

Deadline

The report deadline is visible in the top right of the Answer space. It indicates the final date by which you must have submitted your party’s report.

Questionnaire progress bar

You can see the progress level of each questionnaire at a glance from the Dashboard. The progress bar reflects the percentage of mandatory questions which have been ‘saved as final’.

Suggested answers available

A speech bubble icon indicates Collaborator(s) have shared suggested answers for this question.

Mandatory question counter

The blue number counters in the Questionnaire structure indicate how many unanswered mandatory questions there are in a section or sub-section. Mandatory questions will be counted in this total until they are ‘saved as final’.

Unanswered mandatory question

An orange exclamation icon indicates a mandatory question which has not yet been saved as final (see the ‘Save’ guidance

30

section). All mandatory questions must be ‘saved as final’ before you can submit a report.

Completed mandatory question

A green tick/check mark will appear next to questions you have saved as final. This helps you to track your progress in completing the report.

Save as draft

‘Save as draft’ to save your progress and return to a question later.

Save as final

‘Save as final’ to save your answer in its final state (i.e. if you think further edits are unlikely). ‘Save as final’ helps you to track your progress in completing the report. You can access ‘Save as final’ by clicking on the arrow next to ‘Save as draft’. You must save all mandatory questions as final to submit a report.

Unlock

After you ’Save as final’, you can still edit an answer if you wish. Simply select ‘Unlock’ to edit. After this, you will need to ’Save as final’ again.

Clear

Use this button to remove all selections and clear all answers for single-selection multiple-choice questions.

Conditional questions

The eye icon by the Questionnaire structure reveals or hides conditional questions when selected. For more information, please see ‘conditional questions’ in this guide.

Attach file

Select this button to attach files such as Word documents, PDFs, or jpeg images to your answer. Repeat to add more files.

Attach URL link

Select this button to attach weblinks (e.g. www.ors.ngo) to your answer. Repeat to add more weblinks.

31

Further help

Please use this guide to answer your questions. If your question is still unanswered, please take one of the following steps:

- If your query is about a specific question in the questionnaire, please send a message to the relevant MEA secretariat using the ‘Contact Secretariat’ button at the top right of the ORS.

- For any other queries, please send an email to your main contact in the MEA secretariat. You will have received an email from them when you were invited to the ORS.

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva

Telephone: +41 (0)22 917 4144/6072

Email: [email protected]

World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe

UN City, Marmorvej 51, DK-2100 Copenhagen

Telephone: +45 45 33 70 00

Email: [email protected]

Ref.: 2024/OES/16/ENV/220

Geneva and Copenhagen, 16 January 2025

Dear Ministers,

We have the honour to invite you to report in accordance with your Government’s

obligation under article 7 of the Protocol on Water and Health, jointly serviced by the United

Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe). According to this provision, every three years,

Parties shall collect and evaluate data on their progress towards the achievement of the targets set

under article 6 of the Protocol, and on indicators designed to show how far that progress has

contributed towards preventing, controlling or reducing water-related diseases. Parties must

provide a summary report of the data collected and evaluated and of the progress achieved to the

Protocol secretariat. On the basis of the national summary reports, the Meeting of the Parties

evaluates the situation with implementation of the Protocol.

The seventh session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Protocol, which we hope you will

attend, will take place in Budapest, from 5 to 7 November 2025. In accordance with the

established procedures, the deadline for submission of summary reports is 9 April 2025. We

would like to reiterate the importance of timely reporting, which was emphasized by the Meeting

of the Parties in its decision VI/1 on general issues of compliance, also noting that failure to

submit summary reports within the specified deadlines, i.e. 210 days before the next session of the

Meeting of the Parties, is inconsistent with the requirements of the Protocol.

We also emphasize that the reporting exercise is aimed at assessing progress achieved in

each individual country, as well as identifying the most relevant regional developments related to

the Protocol’s implementation. Therefore, in your reports we invite you to highlight any relevant

action taken under the Protocol in the priority areas of its work, such as increasing resilience to

climate change, promoting equitable access to water and sanitation, and strengthening the

prevention and reduction of water-related diseases through effective surveillance systems and safe

management of water and sanitation services in communities and institutions. We also invite you

to describe existing challenges, concrete good practices, and focus on impacts achieved when

implementing the different areas of work of the Protocol.

Ms. Yoko Alender

Minister of Climate

of the Republic of Estonia

Tallinn

Ms. Riina Sikkut

Minister of Health

of the Republic of Estonia

Tallinn

Page 2

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva

Telephone: +41 (0)22 917 4144/6072

Email: [email protected]

World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe

UN City, Marmorvej 51, DK-2100 Copenhagen

Telephone: +45 45 33 70 00

Email: [email protected]

National summary reports must be prepared in accordance with the enclosed guidelines

and template, which were adopted at the fourth session of the Meeting of the Parties (Geneva, 14–

16 November 2016), as annexes to decision IV/1 on reporting. We have also enclosed for your

reference, a document prepared by the Protocol Compliance Committee, which contains specific

observations and comments, in the form of informal annotations to the reporting template, that the

Committee prepared with the aim to facilitate and streamline reporting under the Protocol. The

documents are also available on the webpage of the sixth reporting exercise.

Finally, please note that the new online reporting system under the Protocol is now fully

deployed and available for use of the reporting Parties. We strongly encourage you to submit your

reports through this system, although the use of the Word format template (enclosed), which

remains unchanged, is still possible as an alternative in the current cycle. The final report should

be submitted to the secretariat as a pdf file with physical signature of the competent authorities.

In order to enable the use of the online reporting system, we kindly ask you to send by

31 January 2025 names and email addresses of one or more respondents, typically the Protocol

focal points, in your country to [email protected] so that they can be registered in the

online reporting system. We encourage you to initiate the data collection process as soon as

possible, even before the registration takes place.

The joint secretariat remains at your disposal for any assistance the focal points of your

country may need in the process of preparation of the summary report.

Yours sincerely,

Tatiana Molcean

Executive Secretary

United Nations

Economic Commission for Europe

Hans Henri P. Kluge

Regional Director

World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe

Enclosures

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

5

Annex

Comments and annotations by the Compliance Committee to the template for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol on Water and Health

I. Background

1. At its twenty-fourth meeting (Geneva, 5 June 2023), the Compliance Committee of the Protocol on Water and Health reviewed compliance with reporting requirements under the Protocol and noted with appreciation that all Parties had submitted their national summary reports within the fifth reporting exercise under the Protocol.8

2. The Committee also recalled, however, that, in the fifth reporting cycle, there had been recurrent and fundamental shortcomings in the area of reporting, including some reports referring to domestic laws and regulations or European Union instruments without specific reference to the Protocol targets, and incomplete information on the targets or within other sections of the reporting template. In that respect, the Committee stressed the importance of reporting in accordance with the template for summary reports of the Protocol. Furthermore, the Committee noted that, when targets were set under the applicable European Union instruments, it was still necessary to report on their consistency with the target setting areas of article 6 (2) of the Protocol. Guidance on that issue could be found in the Committee’s Interpretive Note “The provisions of the Protocol on Water and Health and their relationship with the European Union law governing water and health” (ECE/MP.WH/2019/5/Add.1−EUPCR/1814149/1.2/2019/MOP-5/11/Add.1), prepared within the framework of the Consultation Process with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.9

3. The Committee also specifically noted some common inconsistencies in the responses to part one (general aspects) and part two (targets and target dates set and assessment of progress) of the template for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol in what related particularly to scope and coverage of the information provided by Parties.

4. The Committee observed that it would be useful to convey the above-mentioned observations to the Task Force on Target Setting and Reporting.10 It therefore prepared the present informal annotations to the reporting template with the aim of facilitating compliance with reporting requirements in terms of completeness, consistency, accuracy and quality of the reports.

II. Comments to part one of the template for summary reports “General aspects”

5. Table 1 below summarizes the comments and annotations by the Compliance Committee to part one of the template for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol.

Table 1

Comments to part one of the template “General aspects”

Question Further details

1. Were targets and target dates established in your

For this question, please clarify whether the target setting process was followed in the framework of the Protocol on Water and Health (including if it is a combination of existing

8 ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2023/2 EUCHP/2219533/3.1/2023/CC/06, para. 12. 9 Ibid., para. 13. 10 Ibid., para. 14.

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

6

country in accordance with article 6 of the Protocol?

Please provide detailed information on the target areas in part two. YES ☐ NO ☐ IN PROGRESS ☐ If targets have been revised, please indicate the date of adoption and list the revised target areas. Please provide detailed information in part two.

national targets and new targets established under article 6 of the Protocol) or whether the targets set refer to developing or updating national regulations and to compliance with existing national regulations (i.e. were not set specifically in the framework of the Protocol).

In the latter case (target setting process has not been carried out in the framework of the Protocol), please indicate NO and provide an explanation of the nature of national targets.

Note that the intention of the Protocol is to support prioritization of action at the national level by setting targets in areas needing improvement, i.e. with insufficient compliance or lack of regulation. Where there is sufficient compliance, targets can address monitoring, maintenance and upgrading.

If targets have been revised (updated or new targets), please explain whether the original targets have been achieved (fully or partly) and indicate the rationale for revising the targets. Detailed information on each target area should be provided in part two.

If targets have not changed since the last reporting cycle(s), you may copy/paste text from your last report, but please provide additional explanations as needed.

Note that “ongoing legal obligations” cannot be reported as target dates. Therefore, under part two, where there is a continuous need to monitor under national legislation, please identify a target date (e.g., to reduce non-compliance to specific obligations by year X).

The purpose of target dates is to monitor stepwise improvement; thus the indicators for target achievement would ideally be quantifiable but at a minimum require an estimate of the degree of achievement (e.g., in % or symbols such as -, +, ++, +++).

2. Were targets and target dates published and, if so, how?

Please explain whether the targets and target dates were published, made available to the public (e.g., online, official publication, media) and communicated to the secretariat.

For this question, please provide general information regarding the process followed to officially adopt (e.g., whether the targets had been adopted by a decision by the Government, joint order of the responsible ministries, etc.) and/or publish at the national and international levels the targets and target dates set.

3. Has your country established national or local arrangements for coordination between competent authorities for setting targets? If so please describe, including information on which public authority(ies) took the leadership and coordinating role, which public authorities were

For countries that have already been submitting summary reports under the Protocol, it is sufficient to report further coordination activities that occurred within the current reporting cycle (e.g., meetings of inter-authority working groups) or if the set-up has changed (e.g., new structure established, new organizations engaged). Any general activities for the implementation of the Protocol can also be reported here, while activities for specific target areas should be reported under the respective areas below.

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

7

involved and how coordination was ensured.

4. Was a programme of measures or action plan developed to support implementation of the targets? If so, please briefly describe that programme or plan, including how financial implications were taken into account.

Under this question, it is important to report whether an overall action plan or a similar document has been developed in the framework of the target setting process specifying the authorities responsible for implementation, the concrete measures to reach the target(s), their funding (or lack thereof), and any risks/obstacles encountered that may delay or impede achievement of the target(s). Concrete implementation measures and actions are typically specific to each of the 20 different target areas and should therefore be reported under part two.

5. What has been done in your country to ensure public participation in the process of target setting in accordance with article 6, paragraph 2, and how was the outcome of public participation taken into account in the final targets set?

Under this question, please explain efforts to communicate the Protocol activities (including targets and reports) to the general public. Please also explain how the public was involved in target setting and/or what efforts have been made to ensure public participation. Where public participation can be reported under specific target areas, please report it in the respective areas below, with brief reference to said participation here.

6. Please provide information on the process by which this report has been prepared, including information on which public authorities had the main responsibilities and what other stakeholders were involved.

No specific recommendation here.

7. Please report any particular circumstances that are relevant for understanding the report, including whether there is a federal and/or decentralized decision- making structure.

No specific recommendation here.

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

8

III. Comments to part two “Targets and target dates set and assessment of progress”

6. Please ensure you report progress for all of the targets you have set in your target document. 7. Many of the reports submitted by the Parties to the Protocol show substantial overlap of information for different target areas. This is due to differences between the 20 target areas of the Protocol and the structure of national regulations that serve to achieve the targets. To avoid overlap and redundancy in your reports, where progress in the implementation of your national regulations pertains to more than 1 target area, please explain progress comprehensively in the first relevant target area, integrating cross-references under other target areas, as appropriate. 8. All 20 target areas of the reporting template follow a common structure of 5 points, and reporting on progress would be clearer if you use a similar concise table or list covering these points in each target area. When describing the target, there is no need to reiterate the full-length description from your target document, but the essence of the target needs to be sufficiently captured in a few sentences. Table 2 below gives an example (fictional but compiled based on elements of various reports submitted by member States). Table 2 Example for target area I for reporting in 2025: I. Quality of the drinking water supplied (art. 6, para. 2 (a))

Questions under target

areas Actions taken/planned

Target 1 Full surveillance coverage established for small supplies (those serving 1–10 households)

1. Target date 2028 (see below target dates detailed for each action/measure) 2. Actions / measures

1. Employment of 16 further public health professionals for the 5 health authorities by end of 2023;

2. Intensive public communication campaigns with media and health authorities in 2022/2023;

3. Training courses for public health authority staff in 2024/2025; 4. Media campaign and regional workshops with owners and

operators in 2025/2026; 5. First campaigns for site inspection, sampling and analyses in

2026–2028. 3. Indicators 1. Number of new staff employed in public health authority with

pertinent expertise by December 2023; 2. Registry of small supplies to be established by 2026; 3. Statistics showing workshop participation of owners and

operators; media coverage of information campaigns in 2025/2026;

4. First report on condition of supply systems and water quality in 2028.

4. Progress; degree achieved

About 40 per cent for step 1, targeted for 2023

5. Comments; challenges; obstacles

Legally binding requirement for biannual surveillance by the public health authority passed into legislation in May 2022, including funding for only 8 of the 16 required new staff members; 6 of these positions have been filled (finding sufficiently qualified candidates has proven to be challenging). Whether funding for the further 8 positions will be granted in 2024 is uncertain. Some flexibility in reallocating tasks to positions when replacing staff retiring in 2024 may partially compensate (if no new pandemic requires shifting priorities again); otherwise lack of staff will stretch the timeline. One positive development is the feedback from operators and owners contacted so far that indicates an unexpected level

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

9

of motivation and willingness to comply with surveillance requirements. We attribute this to our intensive public communication campaigns in 2022 and 2023, including increased awareness of microbial risks in the wake of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Target 2 Laboratory capacity established for full monitoring coverage of drinking water quality according to European Union Drinking Water Directive requirements

1. Target date 2026 (see below for target dates detailed for each action/measure) 2. Actions / measures

1. Training courses for laboratory staff in developing standard operating procedures and establishing quality control systems (2023–2024);

2. Accreditation of laboratories in 2025/2026. 3. Indicators 1. Lists of staff members having taken part in training courses;

2. Draft quality assurance documents; 3. List of laboratories accredited for analyses following European

Union Drinking Water Directive requirements. 4. Progress; degree achieved

About 80 per cent for the training targeted for step 1 in 2023

5. Comments; challenges; obstacles

While appropriately equipped laboratories with sufficient staff are available and 2 agencies for their accreditation have been established, the development of quality control systems in laboratories with a large fraction of the staff close to retirement and some gaps in finding qualified candidates for vacant positions has proven challenging.

Target 3 Contribution to global/regional commitments

These targets contribute to achieving target 6.1.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (proportion of population using safely managed drinking water services).

9. For targets that have been fully reached in one of the last reporting cycles, a line naming the target and noting “reached in the year …; see report for the … reporting cycle” is sufficient. It may be appropriate to report actions for ongoing maintenance and operation, particularly if is anticipated that sustaining the level achieved is likely to prove challenging.

10. If you have not set any targets in a given target area, please provide information only under point 5 “Comments; challenges; obstacles” as contained in Table 2 above. Make sure to explain your considerations for not setting a target in that target area. For example, in some countries, aquaculture is not practised, consequently there is nothing to report for target area XVI. In other cases, other public health priorities may justify not setting a target in a specific area, but it is important to explain why this specific area is not relevant. Please note that full compliance with regulations alone, including those of the European Union, does not justify not setting any targets in the respective target area. The purpose of the Protocol on Water and Health is to strive for improvement and to consider the situation in all of the 20 target areas under article 6.

1

Guidelines for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol on Water and Health

Background and objectives

1. In accordance with article 6 of the Protocol on Water and Health, Parties are required to set targets and target dates within two years after ratification. The Meeting of the Parties evaluates progress in implementing the Protocol on the basis of summary reports in accordance with article 7, paragraph 6. The objectives of these triennial summary reports are:

(a) To assess progress by means of self-assessment by the Party and assessment by the Meeting of the Parties;

(b) To exchange experience and share lessons learned;

(c) To illustrate successes resulting from the implementation of the Protocol;

(d) To identify challenges in implementing the Protocol, with a view to informing activities under the Protocol’s programme of work.

2. The summary reports do not aim to compare the situations in different Parties.

3. In accordance with article 7, paragraph 1 (b), the summary reports contain information on common indicators intended to show how far progress has contributed towards preventing, controlling and reducing water-related disease and to improving the water, sanitation and health situation in the region.

4. The aims of these guidelines are as follows:

(a) To assist Parties in meeting their commitments under article 7 of the Protocol;

(b) To promote the provision of consistent, transparent, accurate and complete information in order to enable a thorough review and assessment of the implementation of the Protocol by the Parties;

(c) To assist the Meeting of the Parties in carrying out its responsibilities to review the progress in implementation of the Protocol pursuant to article 7, paragraph 6.

5. These guidelines are complementary to and should be read together with the Guidelines on the Setting of Targets, Evaluation of Progress and Reporting,1 in particular regarding the setting of targets and the identification of indicators to measure progress.

Structure

6. Parties should structure their summary reports according to the template adopted by the Meeting of the Parties. To ensure completeness, no mandatory element should be excluded. If mandatory elements cannot be reported for any reason, Parties should explain the omission or the reason for partial reporting in the section relating to that element.

7. The summary reports should be useful for the self-assessment of Parties (e.g., they should encourage Parties to think about the process, the circumstances and “what is behind the figures”). Thus, in addition to figures, reports should include explanatory narratives that could be of use for other Parties, for instance addressing information on legal, regulatory, financial, informational, educational and management measures.

1 United Nations publication, Sales No. E.10.II.E.12. Available from

http://www.unece.org/index.php?id=11644 (accessed on 14 April 2016).

2

8. Parties are requested to concentrate on, where possible, the following types of information:

(a) The rationale and justification for establishing specific targets;

(b) The outcomes and impacts of actions or measures taken to implement the targets set and other provisions of the Protocol;

(c) Short descriptions of success stories and case studies that could serve as examples of good practice for other Parties;

(d) Major obstacles encountered in implementation;

(e) Actions needed to enhance implementation.

9. The summary reports will be composed of an executive summary providing an overall evaluation of the progress achieved in implementing the Protocol and the following seven parts:

(a) A general part on the process of setting targets and reporting and national circumstances;

(b) Information on targets and target dates set and assessment of progress achieved towards the targets;

(c) Information on common indicators;

(d) Information on water-related disease surveillance and response systems in accordance with article 8 of the Protocol;

(e) An overall evaluation of progress achieved in implementing articles 9-14 of the Protocol;

(f) A thematic part linked to priority areas of work under the Protocol;

(g) Information on the person submitting the report.

10. The summary reports should not exceed 50 pages.

Preparation process

11. Parties are encouraged to consider the participation of all concerned governmental sectors and departments, as well as other relevant stakeholders, in the preparation and use of the summary reports, including non-governmental organizations, civil society, local communities, the private sector and the media.

12. The person or authority responsible for preparing the summary report is encouraged to work closely with the national counterparts responsible for implementation of related international conventions and the acquis communautaire of the European Union. Coordinating report preparation will ensure the sharing of data and analysis as well as consistency between reports, thus reducing the overall reporting burden for the country while maintaining consistency with the reporting format. Such coordination could furthermore enhance opportunities for synergies in the national implementation of related international conventions and European Union directives.

Outreach and communication

13. The preparation of summary reports is an opportunity for communicating the work achieved in meeting the Protocol’s objectives to the general public and other stakeholders, including the private sector, and involving them in national implementation. To this end, in

3

addition to involving stakeholders in the preparation of summary reports, it is particularly important for Parties, after submitting their summary reports, to communicate to the general public the positive outcomes identified in the reports and the obstacles and challenges that remain.

14. Various means of communication can be used, including (a) publicly launching the summary reports on World Water Day, World Health Day or World Toilet Day, for example; (b) making the reports accessible to a wider audience through national clearing-house mechanisms, other media or on dedicated Internet sites; and/or (c) developing and disseminating extracts of the national reports.

Language

15. The summary report should be submitted in one of the official languages of the Protocol. To facilitate exchange of experience, Parties are also encouraged to submit, where relevant, a translation of their summary report in English.

Submission

16. Parties are required to submit their summary reports to the joint secretariat, using the adopted template for reporting, 210 days before the next session of the Meeting of the Parties. Submission of the reports ahead of this deadline is encouraged, as this will facilitate the preparation of analyses and syntheses of the reports for the consideration of the Meeting of the Parties.

17. Parties are requested to submit, to the two addresses below, an original signed copy by post and an electronic copy by e-mail. Electronic copies should be available in word- processing software.

Joint Secretariat to the Protocol on Water and Health

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Palais des Nations 1211 Geneva 10 Switzerland (E-mail: [email protected])

World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe WHO European Centre for Environment and Health Platz der Vereinten Nationen 1 53113 Bonn Germany (E-mail: [email protected])

1

PARTY RESPONDENTS’ ORS MANUAL A guide to using the Online Reporting System

i

© 2024 United Nations Environment Programme This publication may be reproduced in whole or in part and in any form for educational or non-profit services without special permission from the copyright holder, provided acknowledgement of the source is made. The United Nations Environment Programme would appreciate receiving a copy of any publication that uses this publication as a source.

No use of this publication may be made for resale or any other commercial purpose whatsoever without prior permission in writing from the United Nations Environment Programme. Applications for such permission, with a statement of the purpose and extent of the reproduction, should be addressed to the Director, UNEP-WCMC, 219 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, CB3 0DL, UK. Disclaimers The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory or city or area or its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. For general guidance on matters relating to the use of maps in publications please go to http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/english/htmain.htm

Mention of a commercial company or product in this document does not imply endorsement by the United Nations Environment Programme or the authors. The use of information from this document for publicity or advertising is not permitted. Trademark names and symbols are used in an editorial fashion with no intention on infringement of trademark or copyright laws. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations Environment Programme. We regret any errors or omissions that may have been unwittingly made. © Maps, photos and illustrations as specified Suggested citation United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (2024). Party Respondents’ Manual: A guide to using the Online Reporting System. Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Production United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Acknowledgements The author of this report is: Jacinta Jackson. The author would like to thank the following people for their contributions in reviewing the document: Aude Caromel, Frances Davis, Rachael Adu Baffour, Roger Ingle, Leonardo Wong, Barbara Rodeghiero, Jerry Harrison, Neville Ash, Melissa de Kock, Nina Bhola and Daniela Guaras (all UNEP-WCMC).

ii

Contents Glossary ................................................................................................................................................. 1

Summary ............................................................................................................................................... 3

Need-to-know ........................................................................................................................................ 4

Your account..................................................................................................................................... 5

Language ........................................................................................................................................... 6

Accounts and Access .......................................................................................................................... 7

My Account ....................................................................................................................................... 7

Edit your account details ............................................................................................................ 7

Forgot password .......................................................................................................................... 7

Deactivate or transfer your account ......................................................................................... 7

Single Main Respondent account ............................................................................................. 8

Collaborators .................................................................................................................................... 8

Dashboard ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Answer ................................................................................................................................................. 12

Relevant goals/targets (DaRT) .................................................................................................... 12

Past answers .................................................................................................................................. 13

Suggested answers ....................................................................................................................... 13

Conditional questions ................................................................................................................... 14

Supporting documents ................................................................................................................. 14

Tips for answering questions ...................................................................................................... 14

Save .................................................................................................................................................. 15

Collaborate .......................................................................................................................................... 17

Add Collaborators .......................................................................................................................... 17

Assign questions to Collaborators .............................................................................................. 18

Review Collaborators’ answers ................................................................................................... 20

Contacting and reassigning Collaborators ................................................................................ 21

Submit .................................................................................................................................................. 23

Submitting the report .................................................................................................................... 23

Unable to submit ............................................................................................................................ 23

Unsubmit ......................................................................................................................................... 24

Party requests unsubmit .......................................................................................................... 24

Export PDF ...................................................................................................................................... 25

iii

Export attachments (ZIP) ............................................................................................................. 25

Trends & Analysis .............................................................................................................................. 26

Key information .................................................................................................................................. 28

User types ....................................................................................................................................... 28

Pages ............................................................................................................................................... 28

Key icons ......................................................................................................................................... 29

1

Glossary Term Meaning

ORS Online Reporting System. This is the name given to the website managed by UNEP-WCMC. Other Online Reporting Systems also exist, but “ORS” is the shorthand given to this website.

MEA

Multilateral environmental agreement. It is an international agreement concluded among three or more States, which aims to address environmental issues of global or regional concern (e.g. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), and the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats).

Secretariat

An MEA administrative body. As part of their role, they are responsible for performing functions assigned to it by the MEA or as requested by the decision-making body of the relevant MEA, which may include circulating and then collecting and analysing official reports on parties' progress in implementing the MEA.

Party Typically, a national government which has ratified or acceded to an MEA.

Main Respondent(s) An ORS user type. The main person/people ultimately responsible providing reports to an MEA secretariat on behalf of a party.

National Focal Point The key individual within the party who is the focal point for interaction between the secretariat and the party on implementation and associated reporting.

Collaborator

An ORS user type. It describes any individual who is invited by a Main Respondent to contribute and support completion of a report to an MEA. These ORS users can suggest answers for a report, but they cannot submit reports.

Report A final output (completed questionnaire) submitted to MEA secretariats by the Main Respondent.

Questionnaire The question-and-answer template viewed and completed by party respondents within the ORS. This becomes a 'report' at the point of submission.

DaRT (Data and Reporting Tool)

The “Data Reporting Tool for MEAs – DaRT” is a website which provides private and secure national working spaces for parties to effectively generate and enhance synergies in the field of knowledge and information management for national reporting to biodiversity-related conventions. This ORS shares data from finalized reports with DaRT, and it allows parties to access relevant parts of DaRT easily in order to look for data which may be useful to them in their reporting process.

2

Welcome

Welcome to the Online Reporting System (ORS) and to this manual.

The ORS has been developed to support parties reporting to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Its simple design and special features are intended to reduce the reporting burden for parties.

As a Main Respondent, you have overall responsibility for completing and submitting relevant reports to the MEA secretariat. You might be a national focal point or someone nominated to oversee and submit the report on behalf of a national focal point. You can work with Collaborators and use data from DaRT (the Data and Reporting Tool) or past answers which have been provided to help you, but only you have access to the main answer space to the questionnaire used to compile your report.

There are also additional features which you might find helpful for your party’s work in monitoring and implementation. For example, you can view graphs showing trends in your party’s report responses over multiple reporting cycles.

The ORS has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible. We recommend you read the ‘Summary’ and ‘Need-to-know' pages at a minimum. The rest of the guide can be consulted if you have any queries but is not mandatory prior to use of the ORS.

We hope this guide will be a useful starting point for any queries you have on how to use the system. If you have a query which has not been answered in this guide, please contact the relevant MEA secretariat you are reporting to.

We hope you enjoy using the Online Reporting System (ORS).

If you are a national focal point wanting to transfer your Main Respondent responsibilities to a proxy, please see ‘Deactivate or transfer your account’ in this guide.

3

Summary This page gives a summary of how to use the ORS. For more details on any of the below, please use the full contents of this guide.

Log In

My Account

Dashboard

Answer

Submit

• An account is set up for you by the MEA Secretariat. You will receive an invitation via email. Contact the MEA Secretariat if you think you should have an account but do not. You may need to check your email ‘Junk’ folder.

• Follow the link in the invitation email. If it is your first time logging in, you will be asked to set your password. Otherwise, enter the password you set previously.

• You can change the system language in the top right of the screen.

• You will arrive in the Dashboard area. Click ‘My Account’ in the top right. • Here, you can change your account details. You can also add Collaborators

(colleagues to support you in report completion) if you wish. • You can return to the ‘My Account’ page at any time.

• Select 'Dashboard' in the top right to return to the Dashboard. • Here, you can see all questionnaires/reports which your Party has been invited

to complete within the latest version of the ORS. • Select the title of the current questionnaire to get started. • Select an available language to view the questionnaire in. Click 'Save' to

continue. You will not be able to return to the ‘Language’ page.

• In the ‘Answer’ section, a collapsible guide will appear to support you. • Below that is an overview of the questionnaire structure. • Use 'Add Collaborator' to assign colleagues to support you on specific

questions/sections if you wish. Doing this will also give you an overview of the questionnaire.

• Select any question to get started. Progress by selecting ‘Next’. • Complete each question by selecting 'Save as final'. Below each question use

Suggested answers, Past answers, and Relevant goals/targets to help you.

• When you have completed the report (i.e. at least all mandatory questions have been answered and saved) you can prepare to submit the report.

• If you need to export the report for approvals, go to 'Submit' and then 'Export PDF'. You can return to the ‘Submit’ page to submit the report later.

• When you are confident the report is complete, go to the 'Submit' area, then read the information provided before selecting the 'Submit' button.

4

Need-to-know

This page contains need-to-know facts about how to use the system in the optimal way to support you.

Key facts For further details,

please see section in this manual

1 As a Main Respondent, you are the only person who can submit a report for your party.

Single Main Respondent account

2 The ORS permits one Main Respondent per party by default. Single Main

Respondent account

3 Report data will be shared to your party’s data space in the Data and Reporting Tool (www.dart.informea.org).

Relevant goals/targets (DaRT)

4 You can invite ‘Collaborators’ (colleagues) to support you in completing a report. They can suggest answers but cannot overwrite your report draft.

Add Collaborators

5 Collaborators must be added into the ‘My Account’ space before you can flag questions to them to request their support.

Add Collaborators

6 We recommend only ever adding to Collaborators’ assignments. This will enable the system to remember all assignments for the following reporting cycle.

Assign questions to Collaborators

7

Before report submission, all mandatory questions must be ‘saved as final’. When drafting the report in the ORS, answers can be ‘saved as draft’ or, by clicking an adjacent arrow, ‘saved as final’. Mandatory questions are indicated with a red asterisk.

Submit

8

You can export your report (e.g. for reviews and approvals) via the ‘Submit’ page. You can visit the ‘Submit’ page without needing to submit immediately. You can return later to submit.

Submit

9 It is possible for a submitted report to be reopened for edits if absolutely necessary. ORS refers to this as ‘Unsubmit’. It can be initiated either by you or by the Secretariat.

Unsubmit

10

The ORS illustrates report data submitted over multiple report cycles on graphs in the ‘Trends and Analysis’ page. ‘Trends and Analysis’ can be accessed via the top right of the ORS. . Only report data submitted via the (new version of the) ORS will be shown (i.e. it may take time for data to accumulate).

Trends and Analysis

11 Where possible, when you are leaving your role, please inform the Secretariat.

Deactivate or transfer your account

5

Getting started Your account

You will be invited to the MEA secretariat’s ORS (Online Reporting System) by email. Simply select the activation link given in the invitation email or copy and paste the link into your browser. This will open the ORS website, where you will be asked to complete the account set up by setting your password (as in the image below). This is true even if you had an account in the previous version of the ORS.

Please make sure this password is memorable, as you will be asked to provide it each time you log into the ORS website in the future.

If you cannot find the relevant invitation email (by searching your inbox for ‘ORS’) you may wish to check your email account’s Junk or Spam folder. If the invitation email still cannot be found, please contact the relevant secretariat.

If you have responsibility as a Main Respondent to more than one MEA, please note you will need to accept and set up separate accounts for each of their ORS websites.

If you had an account in an old ORS version, please note you will need to follow the invitation and set up a new account with a new password.

Once you have activated your account by setting a password, you will be able to enter the website at any time by using the ‘Sign in’ page. You can access this page from the invitation email, or by clicking ‘Sign in’ in the top right corner of the page accessed from the activation link. Use the email address at which you received the invitation email.

If you believe you should have access to the ORS but do not, please contact the relevant ORS secretariat.

6

Language

Go to the top right of the page to select which of the available UN languages you would like to use as the ORS access language. This will determine the language used for key website content (e.g. page titles, buttons, etc.).

The ‘preferred language’ you select in the ‘My Account’ space (accessible via the top right of the ORS webpage) will determine the language of automated email correspondence you will receive from the ORS (e.g. automated messages from the secretariat, deadline reminders, etc.).

When you open a questionnaire for the first time, you can choose in which of the available languages you would like to view the questionnaire content. If your preferred language does not appear, it is because the MEA secretariat has not provided a questionnaire in this language. Please choose the language you would feel most comfortable answering in. You can click on a questionnaire title (or go to ‘Actions’ > ‘View questionnaire’) in the Dashboard to open a questionnaire and start preparing your party’s report.

Once you have selected your questionnaire language, it cannot be changed. Any Collaborators you are working with will access the questionnaire in this language.

7

Accounts and Access My Account

Edit your account details

To edit your account details, go to ‘My Account’ (top right of the ORS website screen) and select ‘My Details’. Here, you can edit your account name, email address, password, and preferred language.

The ‘preferred language’ will determine the language of automated email correspondence you will receive from the ORS (e.g. automated messages from the secretariat, deadline reminders, etc.).

Forgot password

If you forget your password, you can re-set it by selecting ‘Forgot password?’ on the main Sign In page, then entering the email address associated with your account.

If you can’t remember which email address was associated with your account, trying searching your email inboxes for ‘ORS’ to find the most recent emails sent to you by the system.

Deactivate or transfer your account The person responsible for report submission may change between reporting cycles.

If you think you might remain as the Main Respondent responsible for the next reporting cycle, there is nothing else you need to do. Your account will continue to be accessible to you even after the reporting deadline.

If responsibility for reporting is being transferred to someone else in the next reporting cycle, you may wish to ensure they are given an account in the ORS and that your account is deactivated.

To do this, please:

1. Inform the relevant MEA secretariat you will no longer be the Main Respondent. 2. If possible, provide the secretariat with the details (name and email address) of the new,

incoming Main Respondent.

The secretariat will inform you of any other requirements.

8

If you are working across reports for multiple different MEAs, deactivation of your account in ORS for one MEA will not affect your account with other MEAs in the ORS. Equally, if you or any colleagues of yours are contributing to reports as ‘Collaborators’ (please see ‘Collaborate’ in this manual), this ORS access will be managed separately by the Main Respondent(s) of the relevant MEAs. If you expect you should be given access to a report as a Collaborator (i.e. a contributor without the responsibility of submitting the final report), please contact the relevant Main Respondent to request they provide you with access.

If you continue to receive emails from the ORS when you believe you shouldn’t, please contact the relevant MEA secretariat with UNEP-WCMC’s address ([email protected]) in CC.

Single Main Respondent account

By default, your party has one Main Respondent. The Main Respondent has overall responsibility for the submission of a report.

Depending on the secretariat’s approach, it may be possible to request the MEA secretariat to facilitate multiple Main Respondent accounts by sending them an email to explain why. If you are a National Focal Point who wants to give responsibility for report completion to a colleague, you may wish to follow one of these options:

a) Add Collaborator: Add your colleague as a Collaborator (see ‘Add Collaborators’ in this guide). They will be able to suggest answers but not submit the report.

b) Transfer: Transfer the Main Respondent role/account to your colleague (see above). You can be provided with access as a Collaborator, if you wish. Simply request your colleague acting as the Main Respondent to provide you access by sending you an invitation to collaborate. You would then receive the invitation via email to access the ORS. More information on this can be found under ‘Collaborate’ in this manual.

c) Request: Request multiple Main Respondents by sending an email to the secretariat. It is at the discretion of individual MEA secretariats to decide whether to apply this customised setting.

Before sending an email request for multiple Main Respondent accounts to the relevant MEA secretariat, please be aware of your ability to use the following:

• Export PDF copies of the report (others can review copies of the report). • Use the ‘Collaborator’ function (an unlimited number of colleagues can be invited to provide

answers for the report).  Collaborators can suggest answers, see other Collaborators’ answers, and view the

whole questionnaire.  Collaborators cannot consolidate/overwrite answers in the main report, nor submit

reports.

Collaborators Please see the ‘Collaborate’ section in this guide for more information about Collaborators.

9

Dashboard The dashboard is your starting point for accessing different questionnaires and reports. See the image below for explanations of different parts of the dashboard.

Dashboard (annotated)

Label Name Description

1 Dashboard

The Dashboard is the page you can see here. It shows all questionnaires which have ever been shared on the ORS with your party by the secretariat. You can go back to the Dashboard at any time by selecting this.

2 Trends & Analysis

The Trends & Analysis pages illustrate data from different reports within graphs. After your party has submitted multiple reports for the same report type, you will be able to track changes over time using these pages.

3 My Account The My Account pages enable you to manage your ORS account, as well as view any Collaborators your party is working or has worked with to support report completion.

4 Contact Secretariat

Use this button to draft emails to the secretariat if you have queries or concerns which cannot be resolved through this guide.

5 Sign out

You can sign in and out of the ORS at any time by using the password you created, and the email address associated with your account. Unless you have changed this, this will be the email account to which you received the invitation email to the ORS. Your questionnaire

1 v

2 v

3 v

4 v

6 v

8 v

9 v

10

5

7 v 11

12

13

14

10

progress will always be saved (please remember to select ‘save as draft’ or ‘save as final’ for individual questions to ensure this).

6 Language

The language used by the ORS website can be changed by using this button. Choose one of the UN languages available. To change the language you receive automated emails in, instead edit your account details under ‘My Account’. The language in which you view each questionnaire is instead determined by the language selected from the Welcome page when a questionnaire is first opened.

7 All questionnaires

This table shows all questionnaires ever shared with your party through the ORS to facilitate reporting. Select the title of each column of the table to reorder questionnaires by the topic of that title.

8 Questionnaire title

Questionnaires can be opened by selecting the Questionnaire title. Questionnaires which are “not started” or “in progress” can be viewed and edited by selecting the Questionnaire title, while “submitted” questionnaires can only be viewed.

9 Creation date

Items in this column show the date a questionnaire was created by the secretariat in the format YYYY-MM (Year-Month). Select the arrow toggle by the column title to order the questionnaire list by creation date.

10 Deadline

Items in this column show the final permitted submission day for completed questionnaires (reports) in the format YYY-MM-DD (Year- Month-Day). Reports should be submitted any time before this date. Select the arrow toggle by the column title to order the questionnaire list by the deadline.

11 Status

A questionnaire can have one of these possible statuses:

- Not started – The questionnaire has not been opened. Select the questionnaire title to get started.

- In progress – The questionnaire is underway. This means the questionnaire has been opened by the Main Respondent. However, it does not necessarily mean they have started drafting responses. For the progress bar to increase from 0%, at least one of the mandatory questions must be “saved as final”.

- Submitted – The report (completed questionnaire) has been submitted to the MEA secretariat. This is the target status which your party should be aiming to reach.

- Unsubmit requested – Your party has requested that the report submission be reversed so the questionnaire can be reopened for further edits. If the secretariat approves the request, the questionnaire status will return to ‘In progress’.

12 Progress

The progress bar shows what percentage of mandatory questions have been ‘saved as final’. You can use this to track your progress in completing the questionnaire. Please note that non-mandatory questions and questions ‘saved as draft’ will not be included in the calculation used for the progress bar.

13 Search Type into the Search field to identify questionnaires from words in their title.

11

14 Actions

By selecting the actions button, you can choose to:

- View questionnaire – Select this option to view the questionnaire (an alternative to selecting the questionnaire title)

- Export o Selecting this will take you to the ‘Submit‘ page. On

this page, you can export a copy of your report. If you are not ready to submit your report yet, don’t worry, you can export a copy of your report before returning later to submit.

o Select ‘Export report (PDF)’ to export a PDF of the report.

o Select ‘Export attachments (ZIP)’ to export a folder containing all the attachments (supporting documents) used in the report).

- Request unsubmit – Select this to request the questionnaire be reopened for edits. This option will only appear if the report has been submitted. For more information, please see ‘Unsubmit’ (in this guide).

12

Answer As the Main Respondent, you have the responsibility to compile and submit your party’s report. No one else can access, edit, or overwrite your answers (which constitute the main draft for the report) or submit the report. If you are working with Collaborators, for example, they can see the questions and suggest answers, but they cannot view, edit, or overwrite your answers (the main draft). This applies unless your party has sought special permission from the MEA secretariat – please see ‘Single Main Respondent account’ in this guide).

This section explains the contents of the ‘Answer’ space and some ORS features which you can use to make the reporting experience quicker and easier.

Please note: The more up-to-date the information you provide in the report, the better the opportunities for monitoring and implementation of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements your party is submitting a report in relation to. MEA secretariats using this ORS will use the answers you submit to develop relevant plans and support.

There are resources available to support you in completing reports. Please review the following to find out more:

- Relevant goals/targets (DaRT) - Past answers - Suggested answers - Collaborate [Manage collaborators question by question]

Relevant goals/targets (DaRT)

You can access data available in DaRT (the Data and Reporting Tool) which might be relevant to the questions in the report. To do so, simply click any goal/target buttons which appear under a question. The Data and Reporting Tool will open in a new window, showing a page with data which has been tagged as potentially relevant. You may need to log in to the Tool. Here is an example of the button you might see underneath a question in the ORS to take you to relevant pages in DaRT:

If you don’t see this button below a question, it is because the MEA secretariat has not included it for this question. You can still check for any relevant data in the Data and Reporting Tool by going to https://dart.informea.org/user/login.

Data you submit via reports will also appear in your party’s own workspace in DaRT if you have one, once the secretariat has “finalized” the questionnaire.

This means that any data submitted to any MEA via ORS can be retrieved for other reports in ORS, including reports submitted to other MEAs using the ORS.

13

This should bring benefits such as:

- Less time spent looking for data to answer the questionnaire. - More streamlined and synergised responses across reports to different MEAs. - Automated building of a data repository for your party within DaRT.

Past answers

Underneath each question, you may see an area labelled ‘Past answers’. These are answers which have been provided to that question in past reports. If no past answers are shown, this might be a new question for this reporting cycle. Or it might be the MEA secretariat’s first time using the updated version of the ORS.

These past answers are shown for context. We advise against directly reusing the answer for this reporting cycle unless you are certain that the answer has not changed.

To copy the past answer into the main answer space for editing, select the ‘Copy and replace’ button ( ) available for most question types. For text answers, you will instead need to copy and paste the answer manually by highlighting text, clicking Ctrl+C on your keyboard, then going to the main answer space and selecting Ctrl+V on your keyboard.

Suggested answers

Underneath each question, you might see a box labelled ‘Suggested answers’. These are answers which have been provided by Collaborators.

If a Collaborator submits a suggested answer for the same question multiple times, their newest answer will always replace and overwrite their previous suggested answer (in the ‘Suggested answers’ space only – this does not affect the main answer space).

If the box is empty, this might be:

• Because you have not invited Collaborators to the report to support you. For more information on how to add collaborators, see ‘Add Collaborators’ (in this guide).

• Because you have not invited Collaborators to this specific question to support you. For more information on how to invite Collaborators to support you on a specific question, see ‘Assign questions to Collaborators’ (in this guide).

DaRT data use example: a Main Respondent submits a report to an MEA (A) Secretariat in 2024. A Main Respondent from the same party, completing a report for MEA (B) can retrieve this data from DaRT the same year to help inform their report. The data continues to be stored and remains accessible to other party representatives in the future via DaRT, without any further effort from the Main Respondent.

14

• Because the Collaborators you invited to support you have not provided answers yet. For more information on how to send Collaborators a reminder request to answer a question, see ‘Contacting and reassigning Collaborators’ (in this guide).

Conditional questions

Conditional questions are questions which you may or may not need to answer, depending on how you answer preceding questions.

For example, if you answer ‘Yes’ to a question, there might be 5 other questions which become relevant. If you answer ‘No’, those questions will not be relevant, so will remain hidden.

All questions relevant to you will eventually be shown, so there is no need to worry about missing any questions.

A button in the Questionnaire structure can be selected to toggle whether these conditional questions are shown or hidden: it looks like an eye. Selecting the button will reveal the conditional questions.

You may wish to preview the conditional questions in the early stages when you are assessing the questionnaire length and deciding how to collaborate with others on various sections. It is an optional feature, and you are welcome to complete the report without using it.

Collaborators will be able to see conditional questions but, as with all questionnaire parts, they will only be flagged to Collaborators if you choose to assign them.

Supporting documents

For some questions, you will be able to provide supporting documents as part of your answer. If so, you might see one or both of the following icons to the top right of a question:

Attach file

Select this button to attach files such as Word documents, PDFs, or jpeg images to your answer. Repeat to add more files.

Attach URL link

Select this button to attach weblinks (e.g. www.ors.ngo) to your answer. Repeat to add more weblinks.

If you see only one or neither of these icons by a question, it is because the secretariat has not enabled them for that question.

Tips for answering questions

The following tips for answering questions might be useful:

✓ Click an answer option (e.g. multiple-choice checkbox) once to select it. Click again to remove the selection.

15

✓ Use the ‘Clear’ button to remove all selections and clear all answers for single-selection multiple-choice questions.

✓ If the answer to a question is “0”, “none”, or “not applicable”, please enter these as an answer (according to the requirements of the question), rather than leave fields blank. This will help the secretariat to understand your response more clearly.

✓ If you feel none of the available answers apply, or the question is not possible to answer accurately due to the way it is constructed, please contact the secretariat by using the ‘Contact Secretariat’ link in the top right of the page in the ORS.

Useful icons:

A speech bubble icon in the Questionnaire structure indicates Collaborator(s) have shared unread suggested answers for this question. It may be overridden by the orange exclamation icon if the question is mandatory and its answer has not been saved as final.

The blue number counters in the Questionnaire structure indicate how many questions require your attention. The count includes unanswered mandatory questions as well as new suggested answers (see above). Mandatory questions will be counted in this total until they are ‘saved as final’.

An orange exclamation icon indicates a mandatory question which has not yet been saved as final (see the ‘Save’ guidance section). All mandatory questions must be ‘saved as final’ before you can submit a report.

A green tick/check mark will appear next to questions you have saved as final. This helps you to track your progress in completing the report. Please note: If a Collaborator suggests a new answer, this icon will be replaced with the speech bubble icon until re-saved as final.

The eye icon by the Questionnaire structure reveals or hides conditional questions when selected. For more information, please see ‘Conditional questions’ in this guide.

Save

Saving your answers ensures your report contents are kept safe and that it is easy to keep track of your progress. Each time you save an answer, you are re-saving the entire report.

If you are the only Main Respondent for your party, it is not possible for anyone else, including Collaborators, to overwrite the content you add to the report.

If there is more than one Main Respondent for your party to the relevant MEA, please be aware that if you are working on the report at the same time, you might overwrite each other’s answers. (There will not be more than one Main Respondent unless you have requested it.)

‘Save as draft’ to save your progress and return to a question later.

16

‘Save as final’ to save your answer in its final state (i.e. if you think further edits are unlikely). ‘Save as final’ helps you to track your progress in completing the report (see below). You can access ‘Save as final’ by clicking on the arrow next to ‘Save as draft’. You must save all mandatory questions as final to submit a report.

A green tick/check mark will appear next to questions you have saved as final. This helps you to track your progress in completing the report.

After you ’Save as final’, you can still edit an answer if you wish. Simply select ‘Unlock’ to edit. After this, you will need to ’Save as final’ again.

17

Collaborate Collaborators are colleagues you invite to support you in completing the questionnaire. This can have benefits such as:

- High quality report responses from different experts. - Reduced time burden for you in completing a report. - Ability for you to review and edit different suggested content for the report with ease,

without concern that answers will overwrite each other. Please note that Collaborators cannot submit reports or edit the main answering space which you control. They can see suggestions made by other Collaborators but cannot edit them. They can only submit suggestions.

Notably, Collaborators can see only the questionnaires which you have invited them to, but they cannot access any other questionnaires or parts of the ORS. Furthermore, they cannot invite anyone else to contribute to the questionnaire. As a Main Respondent, you have full control over any Collaborators’ access to the questionnaires overseen by your party.

There are multiple ways you can provide, edit, or remove Collaborators’ access to the ORS, as described in the following sub-sections.

Add Collaborators

Before you can assign questions to Collaborators you must ‘add’ them to the ORS.

How to... Reference image

Add Collaborators

- Go to ‘My Account’ (top right corner of screen).

- Select ‘Collaborators’. - Select ‘+Add’. - Enter the Collaborator’s name, email

address, and preferred language. The ‘Preferred language’ setting indicates which language Collaborators will receive any automated emails in. This does not affect the language of the questionnaire: All Collaborators will be shown the questionnaire in whichever language you select when opening the questionnaire for the first time.

18

Edit Collaborator details

- Go to ‘My Account’ (top right corner of screen).

- Select ‘Collaborators’. - Select a Collaborator’s name to edit their

details. - To remove a Collaborator’s access to all

ORS reports, go to ‘Actions’ then select ‘Delete’.

Once Collaborators have been added to the ORS, they can then be assigned questions in any questionnaire.

Collaborators will not have access to the ORS until they are assigned questions in a questionnaire. They can only access questionnaires in which they have been assigned questions.

Assign questions to Collaborators

This section describes how you can flag specific questions for Collaborators’ attention (and facilitate their access to a questionnaire).

If the person you want support from as a Collaborator has never used the ORS before, you will need to add them to the system before you can start the process below. See the instructions on how to ‘Add Collaborators’ in this guide.

Collaborators may have been added by you or by previous Main Respondents from your party. We recommend you contact these individuals outside of the ORS (e.g. via email) to check if they would be happy to support you in completing a report before assigning them to provide answers.

Once you have followed these steps, you are ready to start assigning questions to Collaborators.

How to... Reference images

Assign questions to Collaborators

- Ensure you have added the Collaborators

to the ORS (see above). - Select the relevant questionnaire. Ensure

you have completed the ‘Language’ step and are in the ‘Answer’ space.

- At the top of the ‘Answer’ page, select click the button which says ‘Assign Collaborator’.

- Select a Collaborator you would like to support you.

19

- Select the checkboxes next to a question, section, or sub-section to assign it to the Collaborator.

- When you have finished your selections, select ‘Next’.

- Customise the message which the Collaborator will receive.

- Select ‘Send’. - Repeat as necessary.

The Collaborator will receive an email with a link inviting them to open the ORS and review the questions you selected. The questions you assigned will be flagged within the questionnaire copy they receive. If a checkbox next to a question is empty at the selection stage, the Collaborator will not be asked to provide an answer to that question. However, they will still be able to view the question and suggest answers if they want. Click a selected checkbox to remove the check and the assignment. You can set the Collaborator additional or repeat assignments at a later date, but they will only be notified of completely new assignments. For repeat assignments (i.e. flagging the same question to them more than once, including after they have suggested an answer), we recommend you include a note in your message to say which questions you would like them to answer. For more information, please see ‘Contacting and Reassigning Collaborators’ in this manual.

Apply assignments from a previous reporting cycle

- At the top of the ‘Answer’ page, select the

button which says ‘Assign Collaborator’. - Select a Collaborator you would like to

support you. - Select the ‘Copy previous report

assignments’ button If this option does not appear, or if no questions are selected, it’s because they were not assigned any questions in the previous reporting cycle, because the secretariat has not enabled the connection, or

20

because this is the first time the MEA has used the ORS.

Example: Collaborator assignments

In the example below, the Collaborator selected is Edward Aderson. Edward Aderson has been assigned:

- Some of the questions from the section ‘National level information’ o Questions 1 & 2 o Not question 3.

- No questions in ‘Conservation and habitat’ - Some or all questions in ‘Human-wildlife conflict’ and ‘Research and monitoring’ (these

sections can be expanded for more information.

Using the ‘Assign Collaborator’ button described above is the fastest way to request a collaborator to support you in suggesting answers for multiple questions at once.

Review Collaborators’ answers

After you have assigned question to a Collaborator, they will receive an email with a link inviting them to open the ORS and review the questions you selected. The questions you assigned will be flagged within the questionnaire copy they receive. They can now suggest answers for the questions you have assigned to them (as well as questions which have not been assigned to them, if they wish) .

Key steps in accessing Collaborators’ suggested answers:

1. Identify: When Collaborators submit answers to questions which have already been saved as final or which are not mandatory, you will see a speech bubble icon ( ) next to the question they have provided an answer for.

21

• However, the system prioritises highlighting unanswered mandatory questions to you via the (!) icon. This overrides the speech bubble icon. Therefore, you may wish to ask Collaborators to let you know when they have submitted most or all answers.

• As soon as Collaborators suggest answers, these answers will appear in the question space under ‘Suggested answers’ (regardless of the icon shown in the questionnaire structure on the left side).

2. View: Open each answer using the blue arrows ( ) in the ’Suggested answers’ section. 3. Use responses:

• Copy and replace: If you select ‘Copy and replace‘, the Collaborator‘s answer will replace whatever is in the main answer space (at the top of the page).

• Copy: If you select ‘Copy‘ ( ), you can copy the Collaborator’s answer to paste it into the main answer space (at the top of the page) without deleting any existing contents. Click Ctrl+V on your keyboard to paste the answer into the textbox.

4. (Contact Collaborator) - Optionally, use the ‘Contact Collaborator’ button ( ) to draft an email to the Collaborator. Clicking the button will open a template email with a reference to the question, link to the question, and space for you to provide added text (e.g. requests, descriptions, questions).

As the Main Respondent, you are responsible for collating all answers to the report in the main answer space for each question and saving each one as ‘final’. Collaborators can view the questionnaire and suggest answers, but they cannot directly modify the report contents.

Collaborators’ submission of answers will never mean other Collaborators’ answers are overwritten. Collaborators’ answers will not enter the main report unless you copy the contents into the main answer space.

Collaborators can view any suggested answers submitted by other Collaborators.

Contacting and reassigning Collaborators

The ‘Contact Collaborator’ button appears next to Collaborators’ suggested answers. To contact a Collaborator about a specific question, select the ‘Contact Collaborator’ button (next to their suggested answer for that question). A pre-filled email to the Collaborator will appear with a clickable link to the specific question you have a comment or query about.

You can assign or re-assign questions to Collaborators at any time within a reporting cycle by selecting ‘Assign collaborators’ at the top of the page in ‘Answer’ (see ‘Assign questions to Collaborators’ in this guide).

When re-assigning questions to Collaborators for a single report, we recommend you:

• Include a note in your message to say which questions you would like them to answer.  Any new questions you have assigned to them will be flagged, but questions to

which they have already answered will not be flagged.  For this reason, if assigning questionnaire part(s) to a Collaborator for a

second/third/fourth time, please use the custom message (which appears before

22

sending assignments) to specify which questions you would like them to pay attention to.

 Alternatively, you can use the ‘Contact Collaborator’ function (available via a button next to their suggested answer) to draw their attention to specific questions (a reference to the question will appear in the email to the Collaborator automatically, alongside space for a custom message).

• Only ever add to the Collaborator’s assignments, not remove them  Whoever is the Main Respondent for the report next year will be able to review and

apply the same questions to a Collaborator as they were assigned the previous reporting cycle, if they wish. The system will refer only to whichever batch of assignments were assigned most recently.

 For this reason, if assigning additional questions to a Collaborator within a single reporting cycle, we advise you to include the sum total of all assignments for that year.

▪ For example, if a Collaborator has already answered questions 1 and 2 which you assigned them during this reporting cycle, but you now wish you assign question 3 for them in addition, we recommend you assign questions 1, 2, and 3 to them. This will enable the system to record all the Collaborator’s assignments to be used through ‘Copy previous report assignments’ in the following reporting cycle. This will not cause confusion for the Collaborator: Only questionnaire parts which they have not provided answers for will be flagged to them.

23

Submit

Once you have completed all mandatory questions and answered as many other questions as possible, you may be ready to submit the report. You can use this section to guide you through what to do.

Submitting the report Once you have completed all mandatory questions and answered as many other questions as possible, you may be ready to submit the report.

There are a few key things to check before you submit:

✓ All necessary questions are completed: At minimum, you should have completed all mandatory questions.

 To check this, go to the Dashboard. If the report status is ‘In progress’ and the progress indicator shows ‘100%’, this means the report is ready to submit.

 Alternatively, you can check this by going to the ‘Answer’ space for the relevant questionnaire. In the ‘Questionnaire structure’ area (to the left), there should be no blue counters next to sections. These blue counters indicate the number of mandatory questions in that section which have not had an answer ‘saved as final’. These questions are further indicated via an orange (!) icon.

 You might see some questions still show the speech bubble icon ( ), even though their answers have been ‘saved as final’. These will not prevent you from submitting. (If you would prefer to remove them for any reason, you can select ‘Unlock’ on the relevant questions and then ‘Save as final’ again).

 Not all questions must be completed, but all mandatory questions must be completed.

 Please also complete your own review to decide whether the report is ready to submit.

✓ Any internal permissions have been approved: Internal approvals are at the discretion of you and your party. A version of the report which you can share with internal stakeholders for approval is accessible on the ‘Submit’ space for the questionnaire. To access this:

 If you are within the report space (having accessed it via the Dashboard), click on ‘Submit’ (via the top banner) and click ‘Export PDF’.

 Alternatively, go to the Dashboard, click on the ‘Actions’ button ( ) for the relevant report, and click ‘Export’. Then select ‘Export report (PDF)’.

✓ There are no errors: Check that everything in the report is correct.

When all of these conditions have been met, click on ‘Submit’ in the banner at the top of the page. Review the confirmation statement before selecting the checkbox and submitting.

Unable to submit

Are you seeing this message?

24

The report cannot be submitted because not all mandatory questions have been answered and saved. This means there are some unanswered mandatory questions. You cannot submit the report until these questions have been completed.

To locate these questions, review the ‘Questionnaire structure’ on the left of the ‘Answer’ screen. Any questions highlighted with the orange ‘!’ icon - - must be answered and then ‘Save as final’ must be selected using the blue save button:

The blue counters will show how many mandatory questions which have not been saved as final need your attention (e.g. “ ” indicates that three mandatory questions within that section have not been saved as final).

To send reminders to Collaborators to ask them to provide answers to these questions, use the ‘Contact Collaborator’ feature (see ‘Contacting and reassigning Collaborators’ in this guide).

If you have located the missed questions but you feel it is not possible or appropriate to provide an answer, please inform the MEA secretariat of this by clicking the ‘Contact Secretariat’ button in the top right of the page and explaining the issue via the email provided.

Unsubmit

Party requests unsubmit

If you have submitted your report and subsequently feel some changes are necessary, you may send the MEA secretariat a request to ‘unsubmit’ the report (i.e. reverse the report submission and reopen the questionnaire). You will then be able to make modifications and resubmit.

Please ensure you are confident that a submission reversal is necessary before you request to ‘unsubmit’ a report.

To request the report be ‘unsubmitted’, go to the Dashboard. For the relevant questionnaire, please

click the button under ’Actions’ ( ). Select ’Request unsubmit’ and explain the reason for the request. The secretariat will then review your request to unsubmit. You will be notified of their response via email. They may accept or reject requests to unsubmit reports.

Secretariat unsubmits

The secretariat might unsubmit your report and request changes. If this happens, you will be notified via email and the secretariat will explain next steps clearly. You will need to make changes based on

25

their request and then re-submit the report in the same way as described in the section of this guide: ‘Submitting the report’.

Export PDF You can export a PDF copy of your report at any time.

Go to Dashboard → Actions → Export → Export report (PDF).

Exporting a PDF of your report will not affect the submission of your report. You will be able to export PDFs at any time, either before or after submission. You can choose to export the report with only answered questions (this file will be smaller and quicker to download) or the full questionnaire (containing all questions and any answers, whether answered or not).

Export attachments (ZIP) You can export a ZIP copy of the attachments in your report at any time.

Go to Dashboard → Quick links → Export → Export attachments (ZIP).

26

Trends & Analysis

The ORS allows you to visualise your party’s report data across different reporting cycles. This should make it easier to identify key trends and can play a valuable role in supporting monitoring and implementation of multilateral environmental agreements.

Only you and selected members of the secretariat will be able to view your party’s report data in this way.

Please note, you can also download PDF versions of your report – along with ZIP files of the report attachments – via the Dashboard page (select ‘Export’ from the actions button for the relevant report).

How to… Reference images

Visualise results of multiple reporting cycles for the same questionnaire type

• Select ‘Trends & Analysis’ from the top right of the

ORS. • Use ‘Filter by: Questionnaire’ to select the

questionnaire titles of the reporting cycles you want to visualise. Please ensure you select the same questionnaire type (i.e. questionnaires containing the same questions).

• Select a question from the ‘Questionnaire structure’. This is the question whose answers will be visualised.

• You will be shown raw answers first. Click the blue arrows to expand or collapse each answer.

• For some question types, you will be shown a ‘Select chart’ button. Use the ‘Select chart’ menu to select a chart to view.

• For more complex chart types, you will be given the option to use the tabs above a graph to toggle between data from different reports. The tabs are labelled using the creation date for the questionnaire which led to that report.

• Optional: Select any variable from the Legend to exclude it from the graph. Hover over each bar for further information.

Different visualisation types are available for different question types. We hope to provide other visualisation types in the future. Here are the visualisation types currently available:

27

Visualisation types

Explanation Available for

question types:

Raw answers

All answers from your party (from the report(s) selected) are shown. Use the blue arrows to expand or collapse the view of each answer. ‘Text’ question types only have this visualisation available due to the long-form, qualitative nature of the answers to this question type.

All question types

Bar chart

This simple bar chart shows your party’s responses to numeric questions for each of the reports selected. The date shown is the questionnaire creation date for the report(s) selected.

Numeric

Bar chart (by option)

This bar chart shows answer options on its X axis. E.g. specific options from a multiple-choice or rank question, or specific column/row combinations from a matrix question. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

All except Numeric, Text, or Matrix Text

Bar chart (by column)

This bar chart shows column titles from the matrix on its X axis. This bar chart type is applicable for matrix questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Matrix checkbox, Matrix single-select

Bar chart (by row)

This bar chart shows row titles from the matrix on its X axis. This bar chart type is applicable for matrix questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Matrix checkbox, Matrix single-select

Bar chart (by Party)

This bar chart shows answer options in the legend. This bar chart type is applicable for multiple-choice questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Multiple-choice

Bar chart (by rank)

This bar chart shows the ranking positions on its X axis. This bar chart type is applicable for rank questions only. Access results from different reports by using the tabs above the graph (they are labelled with the questionnaire creation dates for the report(s) selected).

Rank

28

Key information User types The Online Reporting System (ORS) is a secure system which is used by 3 core user types. These user types are referred to throughout this guide. They are as follows:

User type Core abilities Notes

(Main) Respondent

Submit reports. Invite Collaborators to support report completion. Change account details.

- If you are reading this guide, we expect this is your role.

- A Main Respondent can be a National Focal Point (NFP), or someone selected to complete a report on behalf of an NFP.

- Each party is associated with 1 Main Respondent account by default.

Collaborator

‘Suggests’ answers to questions to support Main Respondent Can see all questions.

- You can invite colleagues to support you in completing the report. They will be sent an automatic email containing a unique and secure link to the questionnaire.

- Please see the ‘Collaborate’ section in this guide for more information.

Secretariat

Create, edit, publish, and view results of reports (old or new). Create and edit Respondent accounts.

- Contacts from the relevant MEA secretariat will be your first point of contact if you have any queries which are not answered by this guide.

- The MEA secretariat collects the reports you submit to monitor and support implementation of the relevant MEA.

Pages The ORS is made up of just 5 key areas. Below is a brief guide to what you can achieve in each area:

Page What the Main Respondent can do in this page

My Account • Edit basic account details. • Add/Edit/Delete Collaborators.

Trends & Analysis

• View your party’s answers to individual questions across multiple reporting cycles.

• Determine trends over time using graphic illustrations of you party’s answers to reports over time.

29

Dashboard • View and access questionnaires. • View questionnaire status, progress, and deadline.

Language • Set questionnaire language (The system language can be set in the top right of every screen).

Answer • Assign Collaborators to sections/questions of the questionnaire (including copying assignments from previous reporting cycle, if relevant).

• View questionnaire progress. • Move between questions via the ‘Next’ button or the Questionnaire

structure. • Use Collaborators’ answers, previous answers, and DaRT data to inform

answers. • ‘Copy’ Collaborators’ answers (to move them into the main answer

space additively, so that multiple collaborators’ answers can be copied manually into the same answer) or ‘copy and replace’ (to replace whatever is in the answer space with a single answer)

• Enter answers. • Use rich text for text answers. • Save as draft or Save as final. • Understand why submitting the questionnaire is not possible (quicky

view questions which have missing answers). • Flag any issues with individual questions to the secretariat.

Submit • Confirm responsibility for, and accuracy of, report. • Export a copy of report as a PDF and any attachments as ZIP. • Request ‘unsubmit’ (submission reversal) of submitted reports.

Key icons

Icon Title Explanation

Deadline

The report deadline is visible in the top right of the Answer space. It indicates the final date by which you must have submitted your party’s report.

Questionnaire progress bar

You can see the progress level of each questionnaire at a glance from the Dashboard. The progress bar reflects the percentage of mandatory questions which have been ‘saved as final’.

Suggested answers available

A speech bubble icon indicates Collaborator(s) have shared suggested answers for this question.

Mandatory question counter

The blue number counters in the Questionnaire structure indicate how many unanswered mandatory questions there are in a section or sub-section. Mandatory questions will be counted in this total until they are ‘saved as final’.

Unanswered mandatory question

An orange exclamation icon indicates a mandatory question which has not yet been saved as final (see the ‘Save’ guidance

30

section). All mandatory questions must be ‘saved as final’ before you can submit a report.

Completed mandatory question

A green tick/check mark will appear next to questions you have saved as final. This helps you to track your progress in completing the report.

Save as draft

‘Save as draft’ to save your progress and return to a question later.

Save as final

‘Save as final’ to save your answer in its final state (i.e. if you think further edits are unlikely). ‘Save as final’ helps you to track your progress in completing the report. You can access ‘Save as final’ by clicking on the arrow next to ‘Save as draft’. You must save all mandatory questions as final to submit a report.

Unlock

After you ’Save as final’, you can still edit an answer if you wish. Simply select ‘Unlock’ to edit. After this, you will need to ’Save as final’ again.

Clear

Use this button to remove all selections and clear all answers for single-selection multiple-choice questions.

Conditional questions

The eye icon by the Questionnaire structure reveals or hides conditional questions when selected. For more information, please see ‘conditional questions’ in this guide.

Attach file

Select this button to attach files such as Word documents, PDFs, or jpeg images to your answer. Repeat to add more files.

Attach URL link

Select this button to attach weblinks (e.g. www.ors.ngo) to your answer. Repeat to add more weblinks.

31

Further help

Please use this guide to answer your questions. If your question is still unanswered, please take one of the following steps:

- If your query is about a specific question in the questionnaire, please send a message to the relevant MEA secretariat using the ‘Contact Secretariat’ button at the top right of the ORS.

- For any other queries, please send an email to your main contact in the MEA secretariat. You will have received an email from them when you were invited to the ORS.

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva

Telephone: +41 (0)22 917 4144/6072

Email: [email protected]

World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe

UN City, Marmorvej 51, DK-2100 Copenhagen

Telephone: +45 45 33 70 00

Email: [email protected]

Ref.: 2024/OES/16/ENV/220

Geneva and Copenhagen, 16 January 2025

Dear Ministers,

We have the honour to invite you to report in accordance with your Government’s

obligation under article 7 of the Protocol on Water and Health, jointly serviced by the United

Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe). According to this provision, every three years,

Parties shall collect and evaluate data on their progress towards the achievement of the targets set

under article 6 of the Protocol, and on indicators designed to show how far that progress has

contributed towards preventing, controlling or reducing water-related diseases. Parties must

provide a summary report of the data collected and evaluated and of the progress achieved to the

Protocol secretariat. On the basis of the national summary reports, the Meeting of the Parties

evaluates the situation with implementation of the Protocol.

The seventh session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Protocol, which we hope you will

attend, will take place in Budapest, from 5 to 7 November 2025. In accordance with the

established procedures, the deadline for submission of summary reports is 9 April 2025. We

would like to reiterate the importance of timely reporting, which was emphasized by the Meeting

of the Parties in its decision VI/1 on general issues of compliance, also noting that failure to

submit summary reports within the specified deadlines, i.e. 210 days before the next session of the

Meeting of the Parties, is inconsistent with the requirements of the Protocol.

We also emphasize that the reporting exercise is aimed at assessing progress achieved in

each individual country, as well as identifying the most relevant regional developments related to

the Protocol’s implementation. Therefore, in your reports we invite you to highlight any relevant

action taken under the Protocol in the priority areas of its work, such as increasing resilience to

climate change, promoting equitable access to water and sanitation, and strengthening the

prevention and reduction of water-related diseases through effective surveillance systems and safe

management of water and sanitation services in communities and institutions. We also invite you

to describe existing challenges, concrete good practices, and focus on impacts achieved when

implementing the different areas of work of the Protocol.

Ms. Yoko Alender

Minister of Climate

of the Republic of Estonia

Tallinn

Ms. Riina Sikkut

Minister of Health

of the Republic of Estonia

Tallinn

Page 2

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva

Telephone: +41 (0)22 917 4144/6072

Email: [email protected]

World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe

UN City, Marmorvej 51, DK-2100 Copenhagen

Telephone: +45 45 33 70 00

Email: [email protected]

National summary reports must be prepared in accordance with the enclosed guidelines

and template, which were adopted at the fourth session of the Meeting of the Parties (Geneva, 14–

16 November 2016), as annexes to decision IV/1 on reporting. We have also enclosed for your

reference, a document prepared by the Protocol Compliance Committee, which contains specific

observations and comments, in the form of informal annotations to the reporting template, that the

Committee prepared with the aim to facilitate and streamline reporting under the Protocol. The

documents are also available on the webpage of the sixth reporting exercise.

Finally, please note that the new online reporting system under the Protocol is now fully

deployed and available for use of the reporting Parties. We strongly encourage you to submit your

reports through this system, although the use of the Word format template (enclosed), which

remains unchanged, is still possible as an alternative in the current cycle. The final report should

be submitted to the secretariat as a pdf file with physical signature of the competent authorities.

In order to enable the use of the online reporting system, we kindly ask you to send by

31 January 2025 names and email addresses of one or more respondents, typically the Protocol

focal points, in your country to [email protected] so that they can be registered in the

online reporting system. We encourage you to initiate the data collection process as soon as

possible, even before the registration takes place.

The joint secretariat remains at your disposal for any assistance the focal points of your

country may need in the process of preparation of the summary report.

Yours sincerely,

Tatiana Molcean

Executive Secretary

United Nations

Economic Commission for Europe

Hans Henri P. Kluge

Regional Director

World Health Organization

Regional Office for Europe

Enclosures

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

5

Annex

Comments and annotations by the Compliance Committee to the template for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol on Water and Health

I. Background

1. At its twenty-fourth meeting (Geneva, 5 June 2023), the Compliance Committee of the Protocol on Water and Health reviewed compliance with reporting requirements under the Protocol and noted with appreciation that all Parties had submitted their national summary reports within the fifth reporting exercise under the Protocol.8

2. The Committee also recalled, however, that, in the fifth reporting cycle, there had been recurrent and fundamental shortcomings in the area of reporting, including some reports referring to domestic laws and regulations or European Union instruments without specific reference to the Protocol targets, and incomplete information on the targets or within other sections of the reporting template. In that respect, the Committee stressed the importance of reporting in accordance with the template for summary reports of the Protocol. Furthermore, the Committee noted that, when targets were set under the applicable European Union instruments, it was still necessary to report on their consistency with the target setting areas of article 6 (2) of the Protocol. Guidance on that issue could be found in the Committee’s Interpretive Note “The provisions of the Protocol on Water and Health and their relationship with the European Union law governing water and health” (ECE/MP.WH/2019/5/Add.1−EUPCR/1814149/1.2/2019/MOP-5/11/Add.1), prepared within the framework of the Consultation Process with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.9

3. The Committee also specifically noted some common inconsistencies in the responses to part one (general aspects) and part two (targets and target dates set and assessment of progress) of the template for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol in what related particularly to scope and coverage of the information provided by Parties.

4. The Committee observed that it would be useful to convey the above-mentioned observations to the Task Force on Target Setting and Reporting.10 It therefore prepared the present informal annotations to the reporting template with the aim of facilitating compliance with reporting requirements in terms of completeness, consistency, accuracy and quality of the reports.

II. Comments to part one of the template for summary reports “General aspects”

5. Table 1 below summarizes the comments and annotations by the Compliance Committee to part one of the template for summary reports in accordance with article 7 of the Protocol.

Table 1

Comments to part one of the template “General aspects”

Question Further details

1. Were targets and target dates established in your

For this question, please clarify whether the target setting process was followed in the framework of the Protocol on Water and Health (including if it is a combination of existing

8 ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2023/2 EUCHP/2219533/3.1/2023/CC/06, para. 12. 9 Ibid., para. 13. 10 Ibid., para. 14.

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

6

country in accordance with article 6 of the Protocol?

Please provide detailed information on the target areas in part two. YES ☐ NO ☐ IN PROGRESS ☐ If targets have been revised, please indicate the date of adoption and list the revised target areas. Please provide detailed information in part two.

national targets and new targets established under article 6 of the Protocol) or whether the targets set refer to developing or updating national regulations and to compliance with existing national regulations (i.e. were not set specifically in the framework of the Protocol).

In the latter case (target setting process has not been carried out in the framework of the Protocol), please indicate NO and provide an explanation of the nature of national targets.

Note that the intention of the Protocol is to support prioritization of action at the national level by setting targets in areas needing improvement, i.e. with insufficient compliance or lack of regulation. Where there is sufficient compliance, targets can address monitoring, maintenance and upgrading.

If targets have been revised (updated or new targets), please explain whether the original targets have been achieved (fully or partly) and indicate the rationale for revising the targets. Detailed information on each target area should be provided in part two.

If targets have not changed since the last reporting cycle(s), you may copy/paste text from your last report, but please provide additional explanations as needed.

Note that “ongoing legal obligations” cannot be reported as target dates. Therefore, under part two, where there is a continuous need to monitor under national legislation, please identify a target date (e.g., to reduce non-compliance to specific obligations by year X).

The purpose of target dates is to monitor stepwise improvement; thus the indicators for target achievement would ideally be quantifiable but at a minimum require an estimate of the degree of achievement (e.g., in % or symbols such as -, +, ++, +++).

2. Were targets and target dates published and, if so, how?

Please explain whether the targets and target dates were published, made available to the public (e.g., online, official publication, media) and communicated to the secretariat.

For this question, please provide general information regarding the process followed to officially adopt (e.g., whether the targets had been adopted by a decision by the Government, joint order of the responsible ministries, etc.) and/or publish at the national and international levels the targets and target dates set.

3. Has your country established national or local arrangements for coordination between competent authorities for setting targets? If so please describe, including information on which public authority(ies) took the leadership and coordinating role, which public authorities were

For countries that have already been submitting summary reports under the Protocol, it is sufficient to report further coordination activities that occurred within the current reporting cycle (e.g., meetings of inter-authority working groups) or if the set-up has changed (e.g., new structure established, new organizations engaged). Any general activities for the implementation of the Protocol can also be reported here, while activities for specific target areas should be reported under the respective areas below.

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

7

involved and how coordination was ensured.

4. Was a programme of measures or action plan developed to support implementation of the targets? If so, please briefly describe that programme or plan, including how financial implications were taken into account.

Under this question, it is important to report whether an overall action plan or a similar document has been developed in the framework of the target setting process specifying the authorities responsible for implementation, the concrete measures to reach the target(s), their funding (or lack thereof), and any risks/obstacles encountered that may delay or impede achievement of the target(s). Concrete implementation measures and actions are typically specific to each of the 20 different target areas and should therefore be reported under part two.

5. What has been done in your country to ensure public participation in the process of target setting in accordance with article 6, paragraph 2, and how was the outcome of public participation taken into account in the final targets set?

Under this question, please explain efforts to communicate the Protocol activities (including targets and reports) to the general public. Please also explain how the public was involved in target setting and/or what efforts have been made to ensure public participation. Where public participation can be reported under specific target areas, please report it in the respective areas below, with brief reference to said participation here.

6. Please provide information on the process by which this report has been prepared, including information on which public authorities had the main responsibilities and what other stakeholders were involved.

No specific recommendation here.

7. Please report any particular circumstances that are relevant for understanding the report, including whether there is a federal and/or decentralized decision- making structure.

No specific recommendation here.

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

8

III. Comments to part two “Targets and target dates set and assessment of progress”

6. Please ensure you report progress for all of the targets you have set in your target document. 7. Many of the reports submitted by the Parties to the Protocol show substantial overlap of information for different target areas. This is due to differences between the 20 target areas of the Protocol and the structure of national regulations that serve to achieve the targets. To avoid overlap and redundancy in your reports, where progress in the implementation of your national regulations pertains to more than 1 target area, please explain progress comprehensively in the first relevant target area, integrating cross-references under other target areas, as appropriate. 8. All 20 target areas of the reporting template follow a common structure of 5 points, and reporting on progress would be clearer if you use a similar concise table or list covering these points in each target area. When describing the target, there is no need to reiterate the full-length description from your target document, but the essence of the target needs to be sufficiently captured in a few sentences. Table 2 below gives an example (fictional but compiled based on elements of various reports submitted by member States). Table 2 Example for target area I for reporting in 2025: I. Quality of the drinking water supplied (art. 6, para. 2 (a))

Questions under target

areas Actions taken/planned

Target 1 Full surveillance coverage established for small supplies (those serving 1–10 households)

1. Target date 2028 (see below target dates detailed for each action/measure) 2. Actions / measures

1. Employment of 16 further public health professionals for the 5 health authorities by end of 2023;

2. Intensive public communication campaigns with media and health authorities in 2022/2023;

3. Training courses for public health authority staff in 2024/2025; 4. Media campaign and regional workshops with owners and

operators in 2025/2026; 5. First campaigns for site inspection, sampling and analyses in

2026–2028. 3. Indicators 1. Number of new staff employed in public health authority with

pertinent expertise by December 2023; 2. Registry of small supplies to be established by 2026; 3. Statistics showing workshop participation of owners and

operators; media coverage of information campaigns in 2025/2026;

4. First report on condition of supply systems and water quality in 2028.

4. Progress; degree achieved

About 40 per cent for step 1, targeted for 2023

5. Comments; challenges; obstacles

Legally binding requirement for biannual surveillance by the public health authority passed into legislation in May 2022, including funding for only 8 of the 16 required new staff members; 6 of these positions have been filled (finding sufficiently qualified candidates has proven to be challenging). Whether funding for the further 8 positions will be granted in 2024 is uncertain. Some flexibility in reallocating tasks to positions when replacing staff retiring in 2024 may partially compensate (if no new pandemic requires shifting priorities again); otherwise lack of staff will stretch the timeline. One positive development is the feedback from operators and owners contacted so far that indicates an unexpected level

ECE/MP.WH/C.1/2024/2 EUCDE/2422164/3.1/2024/CC/06

9

of motivation and willingness to comply with surveillance requirements. We attribute this to our intensive public communication campaigns in 2022 and 2023, including increased awareness of microbial risks in the wake of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Target 2 Laboratory capacity established for full monitoring coverage of drinking water quality according to European Union Drinking Water Directive requirements

1. Target date 2026 (see below for target dates detailed for each action/measure) 2. Actions / measures

1. Training courses for laboratory staff in developing standard operating procedures and establishing quality control systems (2023–2024);

2. Accreditation of laboratories in 2025/2026. 3. Indicators 1. Lists of staff members having taken part in training courses;

2. Draft quality assurance documents; 3. List of laboratories accredited for analyses following European

Union Drinking Water Directive requirements. 4. Progress; degree achieved

About 80 per cent for the training targeted for step 1 in 2023

5. Comments; challenges; obstacles

While appropriately equipped laboratories with sufficient staff are available and 2 agencies for their accreditation have been established, the development of quality control systems in laboratories with a large fraction of the staff close to retirement and some gaps in finding qualified candidates for vacant positions has proven challenging.

Target 3 Contribution to global/regional commitments

These targets contribute to achieving target 6.1.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (proportion of population using safely managed drinking water services).

9. For targets that have been fully reached in one of the last reporting cycles, a line naming the target and noting “reached in the year …; see report for the … reporting cycle” is sufficient. It may be appropriate to report actions for ongoing maintenance and operation, particularly if is anticipated that sustaining the level achieved is likely to prove challenging.

10. If you have not set any targets in a given target area, please provide information only under point 5 “Comments; challenges; obstacles” as contained in Table 2 above. Make sure to explain your considerations for not setting a target in that target area. For example, in some countries, aquaculture is not practised, consequently there is nothing to report for target area XVI. In other cases, other public health priorities may justify not setting a target in a specific area, but it is important to explain why this specific area is not relevant. Please note that full compliance with regulations alone, including those of the European Union, does not justify not setting any targets in the respective target area. The purpose of the Protocol on Water and Health is to strive for improvement and to consider the situation in all of the 20 target areas under article 6.